Manon

The Prelude to Massenet’s Manon opens with a glittering dance—a gilded Parisian ballroom brought to life. But the music soon gives way to another mood: intimate, reflective, yearning. It’s the essential dilemma of an opera whose heroine must choose between wealth and true love. The most successful French opera composer of the fin de siècle, king of Paris’ Opera Comique, Jules Massenet enjoyed a long and prolific career. A pragmatist and opportunist, Massenet’s subjects and styles shifted to accommodate prevailing fashions. His canny choice of Abbé Prévost’s scandalous, and wildly successful, 1731 novel Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux, et de Manon Lescaut as the basis for his Manon is a good example. Premiered in 1884, the opera soon eclipsed other adaptations, transforming a cautionary tale of foolish young lovers into a passionate story of love against the odds, creating in the process the ultimate 19th-century heroine: a beautiful innocent, tempted and ultimately destroyed by society. The push and pull of love and baser desires creates the charge that runs through its score. The simplicity of Manon’s “Adieu, notre petite table”—in which she bids farewell to a happy life with Des Grieux—and her lover’s exquisite answering vision for the future “En fermant les yeux”, are set against the self-conscious display and brittle brilliance of Manon’s Act I gavotte “Obéissons quand leur voix appelle” and the brash clamour of the casino in Act IV.