Manon Lescaut

Puccini's first box-office success, the Italian composer's 1892 "Manon Lescaut" is a strtling, even edgy, work -- an opera that deviates in a surprising way from audience expectations. Puccini specialized in martyred heroines whose suffering he depicts with sadistic relish -- consider Madame Butterfly, consumptive Mimi in "La Boheme," Florio Tosca with Scarpio or Liu, the slave-girl in "Turandot" enthusiastically volunteering for death by torture. By contrast, the eponymous Manon Lescaut seems to be a whore without a heart of gold, an opportunistic, short-sighted schemer who wreaks havoc on the principal characters in Puccini's somewhat sordid tale. (The opera is adapted from a novel by Abbe Prevost published in 1731 and geographically challenged -- Puccini follows Prevost in locating a Sahara-like desert and some mountain ranges just to the northeast of New Orleans.) Lescaut, accompaned by her brother who also serves as her pimp, entices a wealthy tax-collector in the first scene but flees the fat, elderly, mincing fop for a handsome young student. "No matter," Lescaut's pimp brother sardonically says, predicting that his fickle sister will swiftly tire of her virile, but poor, lover. Sure enough, the Second Act begins with Lescaut esconced in the lap of luxury, enjoying herself as the kept woman of the tax collector. (These scenes are beautifully staged, invoking Hogarth's "Marriage al la Mode" -- a nightmare of wigs and prancing dancing masters.) The opera moves along at a rapid clip -- we see the young lovers mooning around one another for a brief duet, but the show's main emphasis is on Lescaut's cavalier and mercenerary career as a courtesan. Sensing his sister's boredom with her fat old lover, Lescaut's brother obligingly lures the student back to his sister's boudoir where another duet ensues and the poor fellow is once again ensnared. Alas, he doesn't get to enjoy Manon's charms -- the tax collector intervenes and has Mademoiselle Lescaut arrested for stealing his jewels. (Both brother and lover implore her to flee from the rich man's palace, but she tarries, looting gem-studded necklaces and rings, thus insuring her arrest.) The lover seizes a sword and announces that he will defend Manon to the death. But when some soldiers point guns at him, the lover thinks better of his vow and, throwing the saber to the floor, stalks off sulking. In the next Act, the opera seems to come to a suitably dire end -- in a characteristically sadistic scene, Puccini shows common prostitutes, half-crazed and desperate, paraded before nasty soldiers on the way to be transported to New Orleans, at that time the end of the earth. Lescaut's lover tries to intervene and, again, fails -- this guy is completely ineffectual at everything he attempts. But he gets a job as a seaman on the fateful vessel transporting his girlfriend to French Arcadia. Here is where one senses that the opera could end. The lover has made a supreme sacrifice, the pimp brother stands disconsolate, and the proud, vicious Manon Lescaut is doomed to misery in the colonies. But Puccini appends an unsatisfactory closing act, a half-digested, incomplete-seeming coda: in the colonies, we are told by intertitles that Lescaut has stirred up more trouble with her ceaseless flirting and, after causing a duel, she and her lover, the poor student who has followed her to New Orleans, flee across the desert. In the sun-burnt dunes, Lescaut expires from inanition after warbling a series of interminable arias. The Minnesota Opera company production of this show featured somewhat soft, unsteady singing -- the lover periodically hit trumpeting high ringing tenor notes with some authority, but, generally, seemed to be fairly weak. (Like many of Puccini's operas, the soprano writing is a little cloying -- the real emphasis in the opera is on the heroic tenor who should bring a brassy, declamatory zeal to his singing; I thought that this was, more or less, lacking in this production.) The opera's libretto is weird, a mix between standard 19th century melodrama and verismo. The final act seems so disconnected from the rest of the show as to impart to the proceedings a kind of post-modern, absurdist frisson; the ending seems completely unmotivated by anything we have seen before, is not particularly symbolic in any way that I could ascertain, and so Lescaut's perishing on the "lone and level sands" of New Orleans seems arbitrary, whimsical, a kind of surrealistic gesture. The set was handsome, a huge, somewhat distorted mirror reflecting the actors and framing them as if applying Cubism to fracture handsome Watteau tableaux into disturbing fragments. A life-size armoire in Act Two capped with a grotesque torso-bust of the foppish tax collector (he wears a wig with double horned prominences)swells into a tall obelisk by the end of the act, symbolizing the acquisitive and rapacious nature of our heroine -- the armoire is packed with jewels. In the final act, fragments of the armoire litter the desert like the ruins of an smashed and ancient palace. The opera is staged with two innovations that I think praiseworthy and imaginative. First, the curtain is decorated with parchment patch about the size of house's wall -- this can be used to project the intertitles which silent-movie style are integral to explaining the strange jump cuts and time lapses in the opera. In one instance, the parchment-like patch, torn as if by a lightning strike, is used to project the titles to an important aria sung by the leading man, a pleasing Brechtian effect, I thought. Second, the director figures out a way to make the final death scene slightly less intolerable -- just when you expect and fervently hope that Manon has died, she revives (this is standard trick in Puccini) and hops implausibly to her feet, singing with renewed spirit and aplomb. The director shows that this is a kind of fantasy in the delirious mind of the sun-struck hero, Manon is probably dead and her lover is merely imagining her revival -- and as she sings her final words, the parchment patch, which has split open at its tear to admit her, slowly closes, sealing her away from her beloved, a neat image for the heroine's death.