Manon Lescaut 164

Recondite Harmony: Manon Lescaut 164 Recondite Harmony: the Operas of Puccini Chapter 6: Manon Lescaut: towards a new country “When you come to Puccini, the composer of the latest Manon Lescaut, then indeed the ground is so transformed that you could almost think yourself in a new country.” - George Bernard Shaw, 18941 For Shaw, Puccini’s “new country” was “the domain of Italian opera [...] enlarged by an annexation of German territory.”2 But Puccini’s journey toward the startlingly new musical landscape we find in Manon Lescaut was not just by way of Bayreuth. Rather, Puccini’s third opera breaks new ground in many other respects: Manon Lescaut (1893) is his first opera to have a libretto created with the active input of the composer, the first to move toward realism, the first to demonstrate a specific couleur locale (here, eighteenth-century France), and the first to involve librettists Luigi Illica3 and Giuseppe Giacosa4 (the eventual collaborators for his most successful works, La bohème, Tosca and Madama Butterfly). Musically, Manon Lescaut begins the process in Puccini’s operas of exhibiting a continuous musical texture, extensive leitmotivic manipulation, the motivic parallelism of the MPI (“motivo di prima intenzione”5) and utilization of the whole-tone collection.6 If, with Manon Lescaut, 1 Bernard Shaw, “Born-Again Italian Opera” The World (23 May 1894). Reprinted in Music in London, 3 vols (London: Constable: 1932, 1950), 219. 2 Ibid. 3 Luigi Illica (1857-1919) librettist and playwright, was part of the Milanese scapigliatura that revolved around Arrigo Boito; he wrote more than 80 libretti for Puccini, Franchetti, Giordano, Mascagni and Catalani. La Nuova Enciclopedia della Musica (Milan: Garzanti, 1983, rep. 1991): s.v. “Illica.” 4 Giuseppe Giacosa (1847-1906) was an important dramatist, known mostly for his plays Una partita a scacchi (1871), Tristi amori (1887) and Come le foglie (1900), and director of the Società degli Autori from 1895. La Nuova Enciclopedia della Musica (Milan: Garzanti, 1983, rep. 1991): s.v.”Giacosa.” His plays were interpreted by, among others, Eleonora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt, the latter of whom brought him with her on a tour of his play in America. He wrote his reminiscences of his voyage to the United States in Impressioni d’America (Milan: Cogliati, 1902; reprint Padua: Muzzio, 1994). 5 “Motivic parallelism” is a Schenkerian concept in which a series of pitch-classes or intervals is restated on one or more structural levels. See chapter 3 for a discussion of this as an aspect of the MPI. As to the appropriateness of using Schenkerian notions in this repertoire, please see the Introduction. Recondite Harmony: Manon Lescaut 165 Puccini has not quite reached the promised land of complete mastery over his art, then it is surely in his sights. into the wild Abbé Prévost’s Histoire du chevalier Des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, the seventh, final volume of his Memoires et aventures d’un homme de qualité qui s’est retiré du monde (1731),7 also begins with a voyage to a new country. When we first see Manon she is in chains, a prisoner shackled to prostitutes, and bound for exile to America. Yet a “man of quality,” the Marquis de Renoncour, takes pity on this “belle fille” and, despite her condition, imagines that she seems a person of high birth.8 Soon, Renoncour meets her lover, Renato Des Grieux, to whom he lends money. Manon and Des Grieux depart together for America, with no regrets at leaving Europe: Des Grieux felt “the nearer we approached America, the more did I feel my heart expand and become tranquil.”9 Instead of happiness, though, the lovers find in their new land only tragic separation through Manon’s death. Two years later, Des Grieux 6 There is one whole-tone chord in Puccini’s first opera Le villi, at II/54/14. 7 Hesdin d’Antoine François Prévost (1697-1763) was sent to study with Jesuits after the death of his mother, but by the age of 16 was a volunteer in the army. After writing an anti-Jesuit publication in 1721, he was ordained a priest in 1726 in Rouen. The next year he was transferred to Paris where he began to write the Mémoires. Defrocked and wanted by the police, he fled to Holland and then England. Prévost published a separate edition of Manon Lescaut’s story in 1733, and a revised edition in 1753. Galtayries, Flore. Abbé Prévost: Manon Lescaut (Rosny-sous-Bois: Bréal, 1999), 13-14. 8 It is Manon’s beautiful appearance that instigates Renoncour’s narrative, and indeed all the events in her life: we get very little information about who she is beyond what Des Grieux relates through Renoncour to us. Manon is constantly seen as a reflection in someone else’s eyes, mostly those of Des Grieux, who, having fallen in love with her at first sight, is so blinded by love that Manon’s often cruel actions often seem a mystery to him, and so Manon remains a cipher. The novel is written as a narration of a narration - thus twice removed from a first-hand account, even though it is probably based on true events in Prévost’s own life involving his long-term liaison—and exile—with a Dutch woman named Lenki Eckhardt. Engel has suggested that Prévost derived his story from Penelope Aubin’s The Illustrious French Lovers (1727). Engel, Claire-Eliane. Figures et Aventues du XVIIIe Siècle: Voyages et Découvertes de l’Abbé Prévost. (Paris: Editions ‘Je Sers’, 1939). 9 “Plus nous avançions vers l’Amérique, plus je sentais mon coeur s’élargir et devenir tranquille.” Abbé Prévost, Histoire du chevalier Des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (rep., Paris: Dentu, 1892), 290. According to a letter by librettist Illica, Manon and Des Grieux see America as their “new and true country [where] there is love” Luigi Illica, letter to Giulio Ricordi, Milan, 24 April 1892. Eugenio Gara, ed. Carteggi Pucciniani. (Milan: Ricordi, 1958), 71. Recondite Harmony: Manon Lescaut 166 and Renoncour meet again, and the former relates the story of his adventures with Manon, which constitutes the remainder of the book. In turning this almost picaresque novel into an opera, a great deal had to be deleted for the sake of concision, and, in addition, a new narrative path had to be carved out distinct from the one Massenet had made for in his 1884 Manon. This process, about which much has been written,10 resulted in a work of four discontinuous acts. After Manon and Des Grieux run away together at the end of the first, we next see Manon living the gilded life of a woman kept by Geronte, the man from whom she has just escaped. (Omitted during the compositional process was a half-act showing the lovers living happily together in poverty, which was deemed too much like Massenet’s opera, and another proposed act, suggested by the composer but ultimately rejected, which would have shown the two at play in a garden.) Further, between Manon’s arrest at the end of the current second act and her departure for America in the third, Des Grieux’s desperate attempts to free her are known only to those who have read the description in the score, where a near-quote from the novel mentions them.11 By the fourth and final act, the two lovers are dying in the desert of Louisiana, with no explanation of how they arrived there.12 10 See for example William Weaver, “Puccini’s Manon and his other Heroines,” The Puccini Companion, William Weaver and Simonetta Puccini, eds.: (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 113: “the libretto...could with justice have been entitled Scènes de la vie de Manon Lescaut. As in the later opera [La bohème], these scenes, with huge narrative gaps between them, do not aim to tell a story in a traditional form; they illustrate a world.” 11 At the Intermezzo, the score reads: “How I love her! My passion is so ardent that I feel I am the most unhappy creature alive. What have I not tried in Paris to obtain her release!...I have implored the aid of the powerful! I have knocked at every door as a suppliant! I have even resorted to force! All has been in vain. Only one thing remains for me and that is to follow her! Go where she may!...Even to the end of the world!” Giacomo Puccini, Manon Lescaut (Milan: Ricordi, 2007), 221. The original from the Prévost reads, “Je l’aime avec une passion si violente, qu’elle me rend le plus infortuné de tous les hommes. J’ai tout employé à Paris pour obtenir sa liberté: les sollicitations, l’adresse et la force m’ont été inutiles; j’ai pris le parti de la suivre, dût- elle aller au bout du monde.” Prévost, Manon Lescaut, 7. The orchestral interlude, however, does wordlessly suggest something of Des Grieux’s passion and pain. 12 In the novel one discovers that Des Grieux has killed his rival for Manon, the nephew of the Governor, Synnelet, in a duel. Manon and Des Grieux decide to flee, despite her delicate health, and, about six miles outside New Orleans, are forced to stop in the middle of a “vast plain...covered with sand” [au milieu d’une vaste plaine...couverte de sable] where Manon dies and is buried by her lover. Prévost, Manon Lescaut, 311-4. Recondite Harmony: Manon Lescaut 167 However, it is possible to divine in the disjunct images of Manon and Des Grieux some clear and logical ordering: we first see both Manon and Des Grieux in unambiguous social positions.

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