290. Le Philtre (Auber)

• Opéra in 2 acts
• Composer: Daniel-François-Esprit Auber
• Libretto: Eugène Scribe
• First performed: Théâtre de l’Opéra (salle Le Peletier), Paris, 20 June 1831

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Characters

GUILLAUME, a farm-hand	Tenor	Adolphe Nourrit
JOLICŒUR, Sergeant	Bass	Dabadie
Dr. FONTANAROSE, charlatan	Bass	Levasseur
TÉRÉZINE, a young farmer	Soprano	Mme Damoreau
JEANNETTE, laundress	Soprano	Javurek
Chorus of soldiers, peasants, and girls

SETTING : In and around Mauléon, on the banks of the river Adour in the Basque territory.

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Most operagoers know Donizetti’s Elisir d’Amore, his most popular opera and one of the top 20 warhorses, and almost everyone has heard the sentimental tenor aria, “Una furtiva lagrima”. Delightful though Elisir is, it has overshadowed the original, an opera that remained in the Paris repertoire for three decades.

At first, it seems, there were objections from conservatives who felt that a bucolic comedy in the style of Rousseau’s Devin du village sullied the dignity of the Opéra, and would have been better suited to the Opéra-Comique, where most of Auber’s operas appeared.

“One should not attach much importance to this kind of criticism, which has no other foundation than the disappointment of troubled old habits,” Fétis¹ wrote.

He predicted that this “light, pleasant composition, which had the rather rare merit of making people laugh at the Opéra, will long hold its place in the repertoire of this theatre to create a charming spectacle with grand ballets”.

Indeed, Le Philtre was a “tremendous success”, Théodore de Lajarte² recorded: it was performed 242 times, and was maintained in the repertoire until January 1862, 30 and a half years later.

Lajarte called it “A little marvel! French taste combined with the lively and captivating pace of Italian opera buffa.”

Henri Blaze de Bury considered Le Philtre the only work in the Opéra’s repertoire that could be compared to Rossini’s Comte Ory.³ Donizetti’s opera, Blaze de Bury⁴ thought, added elements of buffo and pastoral sentimentality missing from Auber’s original, but Donizetti’s treatment was more exaggerated:

“M. Auber’s music is lively, ingenious, charming, with a distinctly French cheerfulness, that is to say, a cheerfulness that never goes beyond a smile. That of Donizetti, on the contrary, tackles the situation without scruple, openly buffo with the charlatan, passionately melancholy and tender with the emotional shepherd who laments by the stream. After all, music hardly thrives except on exaggerated feelings; the Italians have understood this, they who have invented for it the grotesque and the pastoral, and undoubtedly that is why the Italians are greater musicians than we are.”

Auber himself modestly thought that Donizetti’s was the better of the two. “If I had the honour to be the manager of the Opéra, do you know, my dear M. Auber, what I would do?” the music critic Benoît Jouvin⁵ once asked the composer of Le Philtre. “I would have the Italian libretto that adorns Donizetti’s score translated, and I would present on the same night L’Elisir d’Amore and Le Philtre.”

“That’s an idea,” replied the composer, “but it would serve Donizetti’s interests more than mine.”

“On the contrary, it would enhance your reputation, one complementing the other, and in this age of contrasts, you would have the better rôle. L’Elisir d’Amore is a score written with verve, but it lacks the wit, the refinement, and the delightful elegance of French opera!”

The Rossini in Wildbad festival’s resurrection of Auber’s opera in 2021 is commendable, and should have given us the chance to compare the two; unfortunately, the recording (Naxos) leaves a lot to be desired, making it hard to gauge the value of the work, or how it stands up to the better-known Donizetti.

French opera demands singers who can pronounce the language. Unfortunately, the only native French speaker in the cast is the Congolese tenor Patrick Kabongo (singing Guillaume, the equivalent of Nemorino). The other singers – especially the Fontanarose (=Dulcamara) and Joli-Coeur (=Belcore) – have little idea, spoiling the effects of some of the arias (such as the travelling quack’s patter song / pitch to the punters). The orchestra / vocal balance also leaves much to be desired. The result is a recording that did not hold my attention. A pity; a better one might make one more positively inclined towards the work.

Certainly, some of the numbers – Térézine’s aria “La coquetterie”, the teasing chorus “Est-il possible”, Guillaume’s aria “Philtre divin! liqueur enchanteresse”, his Act I duet with Térézine, and the Térézine / Fontanarose ‘senator’ aria – are tuneful, even if one feels the honours are with Donizetti.

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Recordings

Listen to: Patrick Kabongo (Guillaume), Emmanuel Franco (Joli-Cœur), Eugenio Di Lieto (Fontanarose), Luiza Fatyol (Térézine), and Adina Vilichi (Jeannette), with the Kraków Philharmonic Chorus and Orchestra, conducted by Luciano Acocella, Rossini in Wildbad, 2021; Naxos.

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1. Fétis, Revue & Gazette Musicale de Paris,25 June 1831. ↩︎
2. Théodore de Lajarte, Bibliothèque musicale du théâtre de l’Opéra, Paris : Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1878, p. 138. ↩︎
3. H. Blaze de Bury, Musiciens du passé, du présent et de l’avenir, Paris : Calmann Lévy, 1880, p. 122. ↩︎
4. Henri Blaze de Bury, Musiciens contemporains, Paris : Michel Lévy frères, 1856, pp. 264–65. ↩︎
5. B. Jouvin, D. F. E. Auber: Sa vie et ses œuvres, Paris: Ménestrel / Heugel et Cie, 1864, p. 54. ↩︎