There are few more tantalising torsos to be found in the history of opera than that of Donizetti’s abandoned Le Duc d’Albe. Commissioned to write two works for the Paris Opéra in 1839, the Italian composer, newly resident in the French capital, duly set out to adapt his Poliuto as the more Gallically apposite Les Martyrs, while simultaneously beginning work on the opera whose remains we have here.

It is unclear why that second project never came to fruition. Two acts were composed and the remainder planned out when problems arose. Firstly, Donizetti was in a queue behind Halévy and Meyerbeer, neither of whom seemed in any hurry to deliver their commissions. Then there were rumours of a change of prima donna in the offing, potentially rendering his plans for writing a radical spitfire heroine obsolete.

Years dragged by. In 1845, one of the librettists, Eugène Scribe, sued the management to free up his text. Donizetti considered doing the same, but a year later he was a spent force, confined to an asylum suffering the final stages of tertiary syphilis. In the end, Scribe tactfully changed the location to medieval Sicily under the Normans and flogged his...