Puccini’s publisher tried to stop him from adapting Abbé Prévost’s L’Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut because Massenet had already triumphed with Manon (1884). Puccini responded that ‘a woman like Manon can have more than one lover’ and that while Massenet’s score was ‘all powder and minuets’ he would tell Manon’s story ‘like an Italian, with desperate passion’.
Manon Lescaut premiered in 1893 and it was Puccini’s first major success. The difference between his opera and Massenet’s is fascinating. Both turned L’Histoire du chevalier into the story of Manon. But Massenet followed Prévost’s raconteur approach. Puccini rejected it. His (many) librettists started with the same story, but turned it into stark episodes, dramatic moments in the decline of Manon. And the music highlights this contrast. Massenet’s lyrical score is a rolling river of despair, Puccini’s an uncoordinated mountain of declaratory arias and dramatic orchestral themes.
We’ll return to Puccini in 2020, to spend a full term on his works and how they changed opera. This session is a preview of what his music was to offer, and how his very Italian dramatic instincts bridged classical music worlds. Manon Lescault is widely rated as a faulty opera, but extraordinary in its offering of new forms and new music, romantic but with Wagnerian restlessness. For a very brief introduction to Puccini and his work go to our earlier website. Then listen to Pappano's intense discussion of the Intermezzo that holds all the emotions of Manon Lescaut.
We visit Puccini’s first masterpiece via a highly controversial modern production, starkly highlighting issues of interpretation, as well as faults in the opera. Where he promised “desperate passion”, modern directors have offered the harsh reality of exploitation of women and male power in a journey to degredation. (La Scala recently set the journey of Manon in train carriages.)
Our production, directed by Jonathan Kent at Royal Opera House in 2014 has been repeated since, to the same clashing responses from audience and reviewers. It offers an array of issues to discuss – so here we provide tasters of the reviews.
The production is well documented on the ROH site. When it first was staged, a New Statesman reviewer predicted it might assign the opera to another 30 years’ neglect, though it was not, as operas go, so shocking. The Telegraph thundered, “There are few things in opera more depressing than watching great singers struggling in the face of an obstructive and pretentious production. Yet alas that is the case with the Royal Opera’s first presentation of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut for more than 30 years.”
The challenge of this production is not just about “nastiness”. One blogger offers this interpretation: “Kent gave us ultra-realism, which kept you asking questions. Would this Manon really be off to a convent? Who was Des Grieux, so well dressed yet without money? Why can't he find Manon in act two when she is clearly a video/internet celebrity? The list goes on and the production required a huge suspension of disbelief.”
But it had two splendid stars, able to convey “the irresistible allure of a pair of ill-fated lovers”, and a brilliant Puccini conductor. You see the opera through the music in other reviews of performances by Kristine Opolais and Jonas Kaufmann. The power of the music in Puccini’s version of Manon’s story was summarized by a Guardian reviewer: “Raw and uneven, without a shred of comfort, Manon Lescaut ambushes by simple means. Passion is embedded in every note. However slim or clumsy the libretto, Puccini's music grips you in its velvet claws. This was so last week, when Antonio Pappano conducted the first new production of the work at the Royal Opera House for three decades. The playing was sumptuous, the cast magnificent.” It was Kaufmann’s celebration of arrival at Puccini listen here to his first great aria, 'Donna non vidi mai' (Never did I see such a woman.) The following year, Kaufmann held his Puccini concert at La Scala.
ROH produced the same production two years later with a less starry cast, and it was again highly divisive, rated “one of Covent Garden's most gratuitously ugly and aggressively nasty productions ever” by the Telegraph. The Opera Today blog offered a thoughtful assessment. “Kent and designer Paul Brown wholly embrace the dark side of Puccini, and drag his nineteenth-century good-time-girl-gone-bad into the modern world… Their dystopian twilight zone is, however, somewhat at odds with the sensuous eroticism of Puccini’s score. Admittedly, when mired in the bleakness of Act 4, it is difficult to find a redemptive note in Manon’s demise - a death which she fights to the last: ‘No! non voglio morir …’ But it is passion and not pointlessness which lies at the heart of this opera, and it is this essential ‘soul’ which Kent neglects. There is a gratuitous quality about Manon’s suffering; it signifies nothing but itself.”