Manon (Opera Journeys Mini Guide Series)

Manon Lescaut

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Manon Lescaut Italian opera in four acts by Giacomo Puccini Libretto by Ruggiero Leoncavallo, Domenico Oliva, Marco Praga, Giuseppe Giacosa, Luigi Illica and Giulio Ricordi, after the novel by the Abbé Prévost, L’Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731). Premiere: Teatro Regio, Turin Italy, 1893

Adapted from the Opera Journeys Lecture Series by Burton D. Fisher

Story Synopsis

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Principal Characters in the Opera

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Story Narrative with Music Highlights

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Puccini and Manon Lescaut

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Manon Lescaut

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Story Synopsis Manon Lescaut arrives by stagecoach at an inn in Amiens with her brother, Lescaut, who is escorting her to a convent school. Manon meets the Chevalier des Grieux and they fall in love immediately. Edmondo tells his friend des Grieux that Geronte de Ravoir, a lecherous old government official, plans to kidnap the beautiful 18-year old Manon. The newfound lovers use Geronte’s coach and flee to Paris. Appalled by the turn of events, Lescaut tells Geronte that he knows his sister well, and she will quickly tire of living in squalor with a poor student: she will soon be receptive to the old man’s offer of a life of affluence. Manon indeed becomes tempted by a life of luxury: she leaves des Grieux to become Geronte’s mistress. However, even though she is overcome with her passion for the luxuries Geronte provides her, she did indeed love des Grieux profoundly, and laments his absence. Lescaut brings Manon news that des Grieux has become obsessed to win Manon back: he has turned to gambling and has won a fortune; consequently, Lescaut has advised him that he can find Manon in Geronte’s apartments. Des Grieux appears, and the lovers reunite, but they are caught by Geronte, who swears vengeance. As Manon and Des Grieux prepare to depart, Manon delays their escape in order to gather jewels which Geronte had given her. The police arrive, arrest her, and accuse her of thievery. At the port of Le Havre, Manon, convicted as an undesirable, is about to board

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a ship and be deported to New Orleans. Lescaut and des Grieux are unsuccessful in bribing an officer to release her, and then des Grieux pleads with the ship’s captain and is granted permission to sail with her. In North America, the lovers are seen in a hopeless condition on a deserted plain, lacking food or water. Manon dies of exhaustion and starvation. Overwhelmed by grief, des Grieux collapses over her lifeless corpse.

Principal Characters in the Opera Manon Lescaut, a young courtesan Soprano Lescaut, Manon’s brother, Sergeant in the King’s Guards Baritone Chevalier des Grieux, a student Tenor Geronte de Ravoir, a Treasurer General to the King Bass Edmondo, a student friend of des Grieux Tenor Innkeeper, dancing master, lamplighter, Sergeant of the Royal Archers, a naval captain, girls, townsfolk, students, courtesans, and sailors.

TIME and PLACE: Second half of the 18th century, France and America

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Story Narrative with Music Highlights

ACT I: A square in the city of Amiens Soldiers, students, and townsfolk pass away a summer evening in front of an inn at Amiens. Among them is Renato des Grieux, a pensive and lonesome student who entertains the crowd with a flirtatious song about love. A coach arrives from Arras, bearing Manon Lescaut, her brother Lescaut, and Geronte, a wealthy older man, and Treasurer General to the King, who has taken a lecherous interest in the 18-year old Manon. At the same time, des Grieux, noticing the beautiful young woman, becomes enchanted with her. While Lescaut arranges quarters for them at the inn, Manon waits outside. Des Grieux approaches her, they converse, and make their acquaintance, and Manon informs des Grieux that on her father’s orders, she is en-route to a convent school. The couple have fallen in love with each other, and as Manon enters the inn, they agree to meet later. Alone, des Grieux pours out his newfound passion for this wondrous beauty, enraptured that his heart has become awakened. Des Grieux: Dona non vidi mai……….

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Lescaut ponders an insidious intrigue, envisioning in the wealthy Geronte, an opportunity for his sister’s future. Likewise, Geronte indicates his interest in Manon, and invites Lescaut and his sister to dine with him that evening. However, unbeknownst to Lescaut, the perfidious Geronte has already made arrangements for a coach to Paris, and plans to kidnap Manon. However, Edmondo has overheard the old libertine’s plans, and alerts his friend des Grieux. Manon keeps her promise, exits the Inn, and meets des Grieux. Des Grieux informs Manon about Geronte’s plan to kidnap her, and they decide to escape to Paris together in Geronte’s carriage. Lescaut, after learning that his sister has been kidnapped by a student, consoles the irate and jilted Geronte, assuring him that Manon is not lost forever: it will be easy to lure Manon away from a poor student; her expensive tastes will very soon be in need of a rich protector.

ACT II. Geronte elegant apartment in Paris. Manon has quickly tired of her humble life with des Grieux and abandoned him: she is now Geronte’s mistress and living in his luxurious Parisian apartment; Lescaut prides himself in having arranged his sister’s splendid present opulence. Nevertheless, Manon has become bored with Geronte, and as she gazes at the luxuries and wealth surrounding her, she sighs nostalgically, longing for her past happiness with des Griex, and realizing that within all of her present

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material splendor, there is not love, but a chilling, deadly silence. Manon faces her inner conflict: her love for des Grieux versus wealth and luxury with Geronte. Manon: In quelle trine morbide….

Lescaut arrives to advise his sister that des Grieux has been gambling heavily - on Lescaut’s suggestion - in order to obtain enough money to win her back. Manon expresses her regret about abandoning des Grieux, and dreams that perhaps their past love will return. Geronte arrives. Musicians entertain, and a dancing master teaches Manon the minuet. The company all leave, and Manon promises to join them later. Des Grieux suddenly appears, having been advised by Lescaut where he could find Manon, but nevertheless, a trespasser in Geronte’s apartments. Des Grieux reproaches Manon for her faithlessness: she betrayed their love for material possessions. Nevertheless, they forget the past and become reconciled: in a passionate reunion, Manon and des Grieux again surrenders to their love for each other. Manon and Des Grieux: Tu, tu, amore tu?

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Manon and des Grieux become enveloped in a rapturous love duet, Nell’occhio tuo profondo io leggo il mio destin, “In your profound eyes, I read my destiny,” underscored with the signature music of the opera. Des Grieux: Nell’occhio tuo profondo....

Geronte returns and becomes outraged to find Manon and des Grieux in each other’s arms. Manon chides him, insulting his age by holding a mirror to his face. Geronte leaves, pretending to conceal his anger and betrayal with ironic indifference, but he indeed threatens the two lovers with revenge. Des Grieux, sensing that they are in jeopardy, urges Manon to quickly escape with him, but characteristically, she hesitates, unsure if she truly wants to relinquish so much wealth and splendor. Des Grieux, observing her obsession with material possessions, admonishes her, claiming that she betrays their love with her foolish thoughts. Des Grieux: Ah! Manon, mi tradisce il tuo folle pensier….

Lescaut arrives and advises Manon and des Grieux that Geronte has called the police

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and they must escape immediately. Manon’s obsession for her material luxuries becomes her undoing. She insists on gathering up her jewels, and thus, causes a fatal delay in their escape. When Geronte and the police arrive, Manon becomes panic stricken and in fear she inadvertently lets her cloak slip, and all the jewels she planned to escape with fall to the floor: Geronte accuses her of theft, and demands Manon’s arrest. Geronte laughs sarcastically as Manon is led away by the police.

Act III: A square near the harbor of Le Havre. Manon, now a convicted thief, has been banished from France. She waits in prison with prostitutes and undesirables, all of whom are to be deported to the French province of Louisiana. Lescaut arrives with des Grieux and plans to procure her escape by bribing a guard. As Manon appears behind jail bars and exchanges words of love and hope with des Grieux, a shot is heard from the harbor: the indication that Lescaut’s plan for her escape has been thwarted. One by one, a sergeant-at-arms calls out the names of the deportees as they proceed to board the ship. Des Grieux, in desperation, prevails upon the ship’s captain to take him aboard by pleading insanity. The sympathetic captain consents, and arm in arm, des Grieux and Manon board the ship bound for Louisiana.

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Des Grieux: Guardate, pazzo son...

ACT IV: A desolate plain in Louisiana Manon and des Grieux have fled to a desolate and barren plain where they vainly wander, seeking food and shelter. Manon expresses her despair: she feels lonely and abandoned in a desolate wasteland. She laments her cruel fate: Manon realizes that she is a wretched, hapless, and hopeless woman, and senses death approaching. Manon: Sola, perduta, abbandonata

Manon begs, reaffirms her love for des Grieux and begs his forgiveness. Exhausted and spent, she dies in des Grieux’s arms.

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Puccini……………and Manon Lescaut

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iacomo Puccini (1858 to 1924) chronologically followed the illustrious and iconic Giuseppe Verdi: Puccini’s operatic pen continued the great Italian opera tradition in which lyricism and melody dominated the operatic art form. Puccini was born into a family of musicians who for generations had been church organists and composers in his native Lucca, Italy, a part of the Tuscany region. His operatic epiphany occurred when he was eighteen years old and he heard a performance of Verdi’s Aïda: it was the moment in which Puccini decided that his future would be as an opera composer. With aid from Queen Margherita of Italy, and supplementary funds from a great uncle, he progressed to the Milan Conservatory where he eventually studied under Amilcare Ponchielli, the composer of La Gioconda (1876), as well as a renowned musician and teacher. As his mentor, Ponchielli astutely recognized Puccini’s extraordinarily rich orchestral and symphonic imagination, and his harmonic and melodic inventiveness, resources that would become the musical trademarks and prime characteristics of his mature compositional style.

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uccini was fortunate to have been exposed to a wide range of dramatic plays that were presented in his hometown by distinguished touring companies: works

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by Vittorio Alfieri, Carlo Goldoni, the French works of both Alexandre Dumas, father and son, and those extremely popular plays by Victorien Sardou. Those early experiences served to elevate Puccini’s acute sense of drama, which he eventually so brilliantly expressed in his operatic works. In 1884, at the age of twenty-six, Puccini competed in the publisher Sonzogno’s oneact opera contest with his first lyric stage work, Le Villi, “The Witches,” a phantasmagoric romantic tale about abandoned young women who die of lovesickness, but nevertheless a youthful work that musically and dramatically remains quite a distance from the poignant sentimentalism which later became the composer’s trademark. Le Villi lost the contest, but it impressed La Scala, and they agreed to produce it in its following season. But of more profound significance to Puccini’s future career, Giulio Ricordi, the powerful and influential publisher, recognized the young composer’s talent to write music drama, and lured him from his competitor, Sonzogno. Puccini immediately became Ricordi’s favorite composer, a status that developed into much peer envy, resentfulness, and jealousy among his rivals, as well as from Ricordi’s chief publishing competitor, Sonzogno. Nevertheless, like all music publishers of the period, Ricordi used his ingenious golden touch to unite composers and librettists, and he proceeded to assemble the best poets and dramatists for his budding star, Puccini. Ricordi commissioned Puccini to write a second opera, Edgar (1889), a melodrama

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involving a rivalry between two brothers for a seductive Moorish girl that erupts into powerful passions of betrayal and revenge. Its premiere at La Scala became a disappointment, the critics praising Puccini’s orchestral and harmonic advancement from Le Villi, but considering the work mediocre: even its later condensation from four acts to three could not redeem or improve its fortunes. Nevertheless, Ricordi’s faith in his young protégé was triumphantly vindicated by the immediate success of Puccini’s next opera, Manon Lescaut (1893). The genesis of the opera’s libretto was itself a melodrama that was saturated with feuds and disagreements between its considerable group of librettists, who included Ruggiero Leoncavallo, Luigi Mica, Giuseppe Giacosa, Domenico Oliva, Marco Praga, and even Giulio Ricordi himself. The critics and public were unanimous in their praise of Manon Lescaut: in London, the eminent critic, George Bernard Shaw, noted that “Puccini looks to me more like the heir of Verdi than any of his rivals.” For Puccini’s librettos over the next decade, Ricordi secured for him the illustrious team of the scenarist, Luigi Illica, and the poet, playwright and versifier, Giuseppe Giacosa. The first fruit of their collaboration became La Bohème (1896), a story drawn from Henry Murger’s picaresque novel about life among the artists of the Latin Quarter in Paris during the 1830s: Scènes de la vie de Bohème. The critics were strangely cool at La Bohème’s premiere, several of them finding it a restrained work when compared to the inventive passion and ardor of Manon

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Lescaut. But in spite of negative reviews, the public eventually became enamored with the opera, and it would only be in Vienna, where Mahler, hostile to Puccini, virtually banned La Bohème in favor of Leoncavallo’s treatment of the same subject. After La Bohème, Puccini proceeded to transform Victorien Sardou’s play, La Tosca, into a sensational, powerful, and thrilling musical action drama, improving on his literary source and providing immortality to its dramatist For his next opera, Puccini adapted David Belasco’s powerful one-act play, Madame Butterfly (1904), for the lyric stage. At its premiere, the opera experienced what Puccini described as “a veritable lynching”; the audience’s hostility and denunciation of the composer and his work were apparently deliberately engineered by rivals who were jealous of Puccini’s success and favored status with Ricordi. Nevertheless, his Madama Butterfly quickly joined its two predecessors as cornerstones of the contemporary international operatic repertory. Puccini followed with La Fanciulla del West (1910), “The Girl of the Golden West,” La Rondine (1917), the three one-act operas of Il Trittico - Suor Angelica, Gianni Schicchi, and Il Tabarro (1918), and his final work, Turandot (1925), completed posthumously by the composer, Franco Affano, under the direction of Arturo Toscanini.

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uccini’s musico-dramatic style reflects the naturalistic movement of the Italian

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giovane scuola, the “Young School” of late nineteenth century Italian composers whose genre was called verismo, or Realism. The verismo genre emphasized swift dramatic action as it portrayed raw human nature in the problems and conflicts of everyday situations. Throughout his career, Puccini identified himself with verismo, what he called the stile mascagnano, the Mascagni style that first erupted in his phenomenally successful one-act opera, Cavalleria Rusticana (1890). In the verismo genre, no subject was too mundane, no subject was too harsh, and no subject was too ugly; therefore, the plots dealt with hot and heavy passions involving sex, seduction, revenge, betrayal, jealousy, murder, and death. Primal passions became the subject of the action: a portrayal of the latent animal, the uncivilized savage, and the barbarian part of man’s soul: a confirmation of Darwin’s theory that man evolved from primal beast. In Realism and its successors, modernity and film noir genres, man is portrayed as irrational, brutal, crude, cruel, and demonic. In Realism, death became the consummation of desire, and good does not necessarily triumph over evil. In this genre, Enlightenment’s reason, and Romanticism’s freedom and sentimentality were overturned: man became viewed as a creature of instinct. In Puccini’s operas, verismo passions abound: Manon Lescaut deals with emotions overpowering reason; La Bohème deals with the cruelty of fate; Tosca with sadistic violence, torture, and murder; and Madama Butterfly with heartless inhumanity and suicide. Cruel death and a deep sense of melancholy pervade all of Puccini’s operas:

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for the most part they express true verismo passions, and they are always saturated with a magnificent blend of glorious melodic sound together with desperate fury.

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uccini generally composed his music in traditional harmonies: most of his music is written in the diatonic (whole tone) scale. Nevertheless, his contemporaries were busily exploring new avenues of harmonic expression: Debussy (Pelléas et Mélisande) was experimenting with Impressionism, attempting to create visual images of subjects through music; Schoenberg (Moses and Aron) invented atonalism with music that avoided any harmonic tonal center or key relationship; and Richard Strauss (Salome and Elektra), was using Expressionism, attempting through his music to reveal subconscious states. With rare exceptions, Puccini made occasional forays into dissonance, but most of his music follows the traditional harmonic patterns of his predecessors: the bel canto giants, Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, and of course, his idol, Giuseppe Verdi. Puccini’s musical style is strongly personal and contains a readily identifiable signature: his music contains lush and arching melodies, rich harmonies, and opulent orchestral color. But always, his writing endows both his vocal and orchestral inventions with a soft suppleness, an elegance and gentleness, as well as a profound poignancy. Leitmotifs, literally leading motives, are musical themes or melodic fragments identifying persons and ideas: leitmotifs play

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a prominent role in all of Puccini’s operas, but they are never developed or woven with the systematic symphonic grandeur associated with Wagner. In Puccini, leitmotifs serve to provide cohesion, emotion, and reminiscence, but their prominence is only to serve as a technique to be exploited for dramatic rather than symphonic effect. Puccini’s dramatic instincts never failed him: he was truly a master stage-craftsman with consummate knowledge, and a pronounced sensitivity of the demands of the stage and its inherent theatrical requirements. As a musical dramatist, he was meticulous in his attempts to integrate his music and words into a single conceptual unity. Two great moments in Puccini’s operas which demonstrate his stage ingenuity occur in the third act action ensemble in Manon Lescaut, the roll-call of the prostitutes, and in the first act Te Deum in Tosca. Just like Bellini in I Puritani, musical motives associated with Puccini’s heroines are generally heard before the heroines themselves are seen: that brilliant dramatic technique is evidenced in the heroine’s entrances in Tosca, Butterfly, Manon Lescaut, La Bohème, and Turandot. Puccini had a rare gift for evoking realistic ambience: the church bells in Act III of Tosca, or the ship’s sirens in Il Tabarro. In La Bohème, his unique talent to musically create atmosphere and realism occurs when one senses crackling and burning of Rodolfo’s manuscript in the fire, or the the sound effects when Colline tumbles down the hallway stairs, or from the falling snowflakes that introduces the winter scene at the start of Act III. Debussy, no friend of

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the contemporary school of Italian opera, was prompted to confess to Paul Dukas that he knew of no one who had so realistically described in music the Paris of the age of Louis-Philippe “as well as Puccini in La Bohème.” Puccini, with the exception of his last opera, Turandot, was not a composer of ambitious works on the grand opera scale: he was not a creator of stage spectacle in the manner of Meyerbeer, Verdi, or Wagner. He commented that “the only music I can make is of small things,” acknowledging that his talent and temperament were not suited to works of large design, or even portrayals of romantic heroism. Indeed, in operas such as Manon Lescaut, La Bohème, Tosca, or Madama Butterfly, the composer does not deal with the world of kings, nobles, gods, or heroes, but rather, in their focus on verismo and realism, they portrays simple, ordinary people, and the intimacy of those countless little humdrum details in their everyday lives. Certainly, La Bohème and Madama Butterfly, epitomize Puccini’s world of “small things,” their grandeur not of supercharged passions evolving from world-shattering events, but rather from moments of tender human pathos. Ultimately, in the writing of music dramas filled with tenderness and beauty, Puccini had no equals, and few equals in inventing a personal lyricism that portrays intimate humanity with sentimentalism and beauty. His writing for both voice and orchestra is saturated with richness and elegance in its outstanding combination of instrumental coloration and harmonic texture.

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In Puccini’s operas, there is a perfect balance between realism and romanticism, as well as between comedy and pathos. His memorable melodies are endlessly haunting: one leaves a Puccini opera performance, but the music never leaves the listener.

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rt is humanity’s great gift to express truth and beauty. During the fin de siecle at the end of the nineteenth century, the zeitgeist of the era assaulted the old order: perceptions of society came into question, and philosophically, the era became spiritually unsettled; man became self-questioning as his consciousness was raised to the era’s cultural and spiritual decadence. Nietszche, the quintessential cultural pessimist of the nineteenth-century, identified those times as “the transvaluation of values,” in effect, his recognition that society had lost its moral and ethical foundations. This great transition emanated from dramatic ideological and scientific transformations: Marx, Darwin, and Freud. As a result, anxieties evolved from society’s utopian frustrations: the failure of the French Revolution’s promise of democracy, progress, and change, as well as the ideological perplexities created by the Industrial Revolution, colonialism, socialism, and materialism. Nietzsche condemned the death of virtue and morality, metaphorically proclaiming the death of God, his way to make society aware that it was in need of a renewal and rebirth of spiritual human values. The popularity of the Manon Lescaut story reflects fundamental anxieties of its late nineteenth century bourgeois audience: it a story whose underlying moral crisis

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provokes and teases, in effect, raising to consciousness the era’s conflicting moral values. The tragedy deals with flawed human character: in a certain sense, it was a symbolic mirror to peer into their inner souls, and thus raise their moral sensibilities.

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he story of Manon Lescaut owes its provenance to the Abbé Prévost (16971763), a former priest who, because of his picaresque life-style, had been excommunicated from the Benedictine order for blasphemy: ergo, the title, Abbé. As a renegade priest, he spent most of his life in exile. In 1731, he wrote his singular masterpiece, his novel entitled L’histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, “The History of the Cavalier des Grieux and Manon Lescaut.” The novel is entirely autobiographical as it recounts the experiences of the Abbè’s turbulent youth in a series of episodes that all take place in the notoriously corrupt Paris of the Regency of Louis XIV around the year 1715. Its primary theme is the classic conflict and tension between reason and passion, and virtue and vice: the story concerns the fatal fascination of a young nobleman for a seductive but perfidious woman. In the end, it is a tragedy about human character flaws, but it is presented with the customary dignity and moral purpose usually inherent in French classical drama. The novel reads almost like a play: its action is swift, it has few superfluities, and it is direct and simple. The Abbé’s novel maintained strong popular appeal for upwards of two centuries: eventually, it

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became the underlying literary source for many operas; Auber’s Manon Lescaut with Scribe as the librettist (1856), Massenet’s Manon (1884), Puccini’s Manon Lescaut (1894), and more recently, Henze’s Boulevard Solitude (1952). Prévost’s novel is a narration within a narration, a very similar structure to that of Mérimée’s Carmen: the storyteller meets Des Grieux who recounts the story of Manon. In the novel, the nucleus of the story deals with des Grieux, initially a fine, upright young man, who is gradually destroyed by his obsession for the seductive and tantalizingly beautiful, but thoroughly unscrupulous, Manon Lescaut. Des Grieux is caught in a struggle between his better self and his instincts: his inability to act with reason leads to his psychological degeneration. But in the moralistic sense, the eventual downfall of both lovers is a logical outcome which is attributed to their flawed characters. If Prévost evokes a deep sympathy for des Grieux - the author himself - it is because his weakness is that of universal human nature. In that sense, man is capable of acting stupidly when in love: des Grieux’s tragic flaw is that he acts senselessly and with pure emotion in his pursuit of Manon; like Carmen’s power over Josè, Manon becomes des Grieux’s femme fatale. So the entire tragedy in the story – for both Manon and des Grieux - involves their surrender and capitulation to instinct. The Enlightenment ennobled reason as the path to universal truth: Romanticism later rejected the Enlightenment and stressed freedom and

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feeling; but the late nineteenth century, reeling from ideological shocks attributed to the revelations of Darwin and Freud, judged man a creature of pure instinct. This story, although written a century earlier, had profound appeal for a nineteenth century audience: its universal theme, morally cautioning against the excesses of Romanticism, castigated, and even admonished the human consequences and fatal destruction when passions, desires, and emotions, overcome reason. In the Abbè’s virtually autobiographical story, the young des Grieux comes from a good family, became enrolled in the order of the Knights of Malta, and takes his vows of celibacy at the age of seventeen. Initially, he is portrayed as naïve, and ostensibly gives little thought to the difference between the sexes. But after des Griuex meets the seductive and perfidious Manon Lescaut, he is overcome by an obsessive fascination and fatal attraction to her: the entire subsequent story is driven by his classic inability to control his emotions and passions. As a result, des Grieux progresses – like Don Josè in Carmen - through a deep psychological degeneration, and continuously struggles between the tension and conflict between his instincts and reason. Des Grieux is unable to shake remove his compelling obsession for Manon, and his weakness causes him to relinquish a seemingly promising ecclesiastical career. Ultimately, his life degenerates into corruption: he becomes a cheat and a scoundrel, a professional card-shark, steals, becomes a gigolo, and lives on the money

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and jewelry Manon extracts from her various lovers. In the original novel, he sinks ever more deeply into moral corruption, and ultimately crowns his new-found criminal career by murdering a prison guard while escaping from jail. The pathos for des Grieux’s character in this story, a creature of instinct rather than of reason, springs from the fact that while he recognizes all of Manon’s character flaws and faults, he is out of control, and remains enslaved to her to the last moment of her pathetic demise.

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he Abbé’s novel became sacred scripture for nineteenth century courtesans: the fictional Manon Lescaut had become somewhat of “role model” for the Parisian demimonde. Verdi’s La Traviata is based on Alexandre Dumas fils autobiographical story of one of the most famous courtesans of nineteenth century Paris: Marie Duplessus. In Act III of Verdi’s opera, Alfredo returns to discover a letter from Violetta informing him that she is returning to her former life as a courtesan. If Verdi’s stage directions are followed properly, next to Violetta’s farewell letter, an open book rests on the table: the book is the Abbé Prévost’s L’Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, and the page of the Abbé’s novel that is open, summarizes the essence of the entire Manon Lescaut story; a story about a beautiful, amoral young courtesan, who is genuinely in love with a man who is unable to give her the luxury she cannot do without, and selfishly surrenders to her material obsessions and abandons her lover.

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“….but can you not see, poor dear soul, that in the condition to which we are reduced, fidelity would be a foolish virtue? Do you think it possible to be loving on an empty stomach? Hunger would cause me some fatal mishap, and one day I would utter my last breath thinking it was a sigh of love….”

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oth Puccini and Massenet attacked the powerful message in the Abbé Prévost’s novel. Massenet wrote his Manon nine years before Puccini’s Manon Lescaut (1893). (Auber composed his Manon in 1856) The Puccini and Massenet operas are war horses in the standard opera repertory, and both tell an almost identical story, yet both are inherently different in their musico-dramatic style. French opera, just like Italian opera, derives from similar Latin roots and origins: both are mired in basic emotions and passions, and both usually deal with those same great primal conflicts of the spirit and the flesh: love, lust, greed, betrayal, jealousy, hate, revenge, and murder. Italian opera can be more direct, and certainly more declamatory: it tends to be much more naked in its passions, and most of the time, intensely scorching as it absorbs us into its conflicts and tensions. But French opera is generally more oblique, more subtle, and even at times, overly refined and sophisticated. Nevertheless, notwithstanding style and traditions, both musico-dramatic styles deliver the same intensity. Massenet has often been called the “French Puccini.” Both contemporary

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composers were champions of the Romantic tradition. Massenet’s music contains a deep poetic feeling, together with graceful, tender, charming, and flowery melodies, at times, described as a “discreet and semi-religious eroticism.” Like Puccini, his technical mastery and his craftsmanship are undeniable, particularly in musical characterization. And also like Puccini, he was also a complete man of the theater, meticulously attending to every detail in the staging of his opera: scenery, costumes, and lighting, as well as harmony and orchestration. When Puccini was confronted with the fact that Massenet had already written an opera based on the story, he commented: “Why shouldn’t there be two operas about Manon? After all, a woman like Manon could certainly have more than one lover.” But musically, the operas are very different. At the time, Puccini was a young and hot-blooded Italian: he created an opera with full-throated, extroverted passions. Puccini said himself: “Massenet feels the story as a Frenchman, with the powder and the minuets. I shall feel it as an Italian, with desperate passion.” So in the end, Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, unlike the perhaps more sophisticated and refined French version of Massenet, is the antithesis of abstract emotion. Puccini’s opera rages with lustful Italian ardor, with powerful emotion and passion, and he makes no attempt to present anything other than an Italian opera. In Massenet’s opera, it is Manon herself who dominates the drama: Manon’s character remains true to French traditions;

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in style it is much more subtle and delicate in its confrontations, and its preoccupations with sexuality are reserved and presented with almost innocence. In Puccini’s version of the story, des Grieux is an impulsive youth, unrestrained, and even hysterical in the expression of his passions. In the end, Massenet pleases and makes no attempt to overwhelm with extroverted passions: he left that to Puccini.

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anon is a fascinating illustration of feminine power, as well as frailty. In certain respects, she is like her coarser Spanish cousin, Carmen, a beautiful woman whose seductiveness exerts a terrifying exploitive and manipulative power over men. Manon is therefore an archetypal example of the wicked and evil conquering the weak: she is no different than other insidious operatic female characters; Mélisande, Lulu, and Salome. Maupassant commented that Manon is a woman of “instinctive perfidy………sincere in her deception and frank in her infamy,” certainly the classical and archetypal view of seductive womanhood. Manon transforms from her initial naivete in her first appearance, to a woman obsessed with the material world, to a victim caught in the act of betrayal and thievery, and then to a pathetic prisoner of fate. Manon, and her lover, des Grieux, become immoral, and amoral: their actions which contribute to their subsequent decline, the actions of uncontrollable creatures of instinct. Puccini uses his leitmotifs for brilliant psychological effect: these motives

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orchestrally reveal what the characters are thinking and feeling; the text becomes secondary. Puccini’s penultimate leitmotif in Manon Lescaut is the music underscoring the lovers’ second act duet, Nell’occhio il tuo produnco io leggo mio destin, “Within your eyes I read my destiny.” This music appears throughout the opera in various musical configurations, but particularly, at the conclusion of Act III after des Grieux has persuaded the captain to let him board the ship with Manon. At that moment, the theme is bold and triumphant and conveys victory, but in truth, it represents an ironical statement from Puccini, the musical narrator and dramatist of the story: the tragedy of uncontrollable fate and destiny.

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he Abbé Prévost, a man trained in the morality of religion, portrayed his heroine surrounded by an aura of sin. For a while, Manon succeeds in her hedonistic ambitions, but in the end, she is a sinner who must seek absolution for her transgressions before she dies: just before Manon’s pathetic demise in the final scene, she repents for her sins, prays for forgiveness, and swears eternal constancy to her faithful lover. The Abbe Prévost’s novel is a cautionary moral story: the wages of sin can only lead to death. In his story, the material attractions of Paris destroyed his heroine, but she has become immortal through the magic of opera. On the world stages, Puccini’s Manon Lescaut is considered one of the greatest masterpieces of the lyric theater. There are other operas celebrating

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the story of Manon, perhaps more introspective, perhaps more delicate and subtle, but none more ardent and profound than Puccini’s first great masterpiece.

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