Running time: 3 hour 35 minutes
The concert has one interval
In the 19th century Massenet was not the first composer to turn to Abbé Prévost’s novel. Halévy had written a ballet on the subject in 1830, and Auber – an opera in 1856. A decade after Massenet’s Manon Puccini created his own Manon Lescaut. The masterly five-act adaptation of the novel was written by the celebrated librettists Henri Meilhac and Philippe Gille. Massenet himself experienced this project with rare fervour. In 1882 he travelled to The Hague and stayed in the very house, even the same room, once occupied by Abbé Prévost. This sense of “communion” with the author of the original text moved him deeply – as did the memory of an unknown flower-seller who, as he said, became the living embodiment of his heroine: “I never spoke to that charming girl, yet her appearance haunted me; the memory of her followed me – she was truly my Manon, whom I saw before me constantly while composing.”
The coquettish Manon of Prévost’s 18th-century tale, reborn in Massenet’s imagination, became a contemporary Parisienne. In the opera both Manon and her lover speak the musical language closest to the composer’s audience – and especially to his female listeners. The scenes unfold as a sequence of arioso moments, each like a miniature romance. These exchanges are free from the operatic rhetoric that had reigned in the works of Massenet’s “teachers” – Meyerbeer, Auber and Thomas. Their declamatory prototypes are drawn not from lofty verse but from the natural cadences of everyday speech. This conversational tone is framed by delicate harmonies and subtle orchestral colouring. The sound world of Manon is a collection of refined “Frenchisms”, an exemplar of impeccable timbral taste and what Saint-Saëns called “faultlessly correct writing”. The lively choral and dance scenes, the rococo divertissement and the gallery of character types – from the haughty Comte des Grieux to the foppish Lescaut – are all lovingly detailed, yet the composer’s true focus remains on the central drama.
The success of Manon lay in the happy union of Massenet’s compositional temperament with the nature of the story. Having created a vivid scenic backdrop of choruses and dances, he concentrated on the shifting moods of passion and the whims of love. Like many of his contemporaries, Massenet entrusted the role of “fate” to the orchestra, which exposes the opera’s underlying conflicts and recurrent ideas. Manon contains leitmotifs, but they are not the conventional Wagnerian tags: they are compact emotional images. For the listener Manon offers no cryptic puzzles demanding intellectual analysis; it is music that appeals to sincerity, receptivity and a touch of sentiment.
Massenet’s fondness for melodrama – for the conflict of love and destiny, for contrasts of calm and storm – brings his work close to that of Tchaikovsky, who followed his French colleague’s output with both admiration and irritation. As Tchaikovsky noted in his diary, “An extraordinarily delicate piece of work – and yet how nauseating Massenet is! What is most vexing is that in this nausea I sense something akin to myself.”
The measure of Manon’s success is evident from the sequel Massenet composed in 1893 – Le Portrait de Manon, a one-act opera with a happy ending, recounting the fortunes of the young nephew and niece of Manon and des Grieux. In the operatic world of the 19th century such a gesture was exceptional indeed. Kira Vernikova
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