MASSENET Angela Gheorghiu Roberto Alagna Earle Patriarco

MASSENET MANON Angela Gheorghiu Roberto Alagna Earle Patriarco José Van Dam Orchestre Symphonique et Chœurs de la Monnai ANTONIO PAPPANO THE HOME OF OPERA Massenet: Manon However much Massenet’s reputation may rise and fall on the operatic stock market – and it has fluctuated wildly over the last century – the value of Manon has remained constant. From the premiere at the Opéra-Comique on 19 January 1884 until today it has held (and earned) its place in the core repertory, notching up well over 2,000 performances alone in the house of its birth. In 1885 it was seen in Britain (in Liverpool, given by the Carl Rosa company) and the Met (with Minnie Hauk). Manon’s resounding success in Vienna in 1890 led to the Hofoper management asking for a new work, and Massenet obligingly dusted down Werther, which had been repeatedly rejected by managements in Paris as being too gloomy and languished on the shelf for three years. Contrary to the account given in his notoriously unreliable Mes Souvenirs – he had to cover up that three-year hiatus in so sunny an account of a life of unbroken success – Massenet had started work on Werther soon after completing Manon, and may even have seen them as a complementary pair: both are set in the 18th-century and both tell of a doomed love affair. Yet while its is hard to imagine two operas more different in atmosphere – Manon so glitteringly sensuous, Werther so darksomely doom-laden – it is on these heavenly twins that, rightly or wrongly, the composer’s place in operatic history is founded. It was Massenet’s own idea to set Abbé Prévost’s novel L’Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731), the seventh and last part of a sequence entitled Memoires et aventures d’un homme de qualité. The novel was considered scandalous in its day, dealing as it does with female sexuality and its power to subvert accepted social values. There is an interesting parallel here with Mérimée’s Carmen, and 1 another in that both tell a story at one remove: the ‘author’ meets one of the protagonists – Don José in Carmen, the Chevalier des Grieux in Manon – and delivers a narration within a narration. But while Bizet’s Carmen, first given in the same theatre nine years earlier, retains its power to shock, Massenet and his librettists Henri Meilhac (part-author of Carmen) and Philippe Gille (part-author of Lakmé for Delibes) marginally watered down their source. Prévost’s novel is set in the Regency of Philippe d’Orleans, a period notorious for sexual licence and corruption in public life. In the novel it is Manon’s brother who pimps for her; in the opera Lescaut is turned into her cousin – marginally less shocking. In the novel Des Grieux really does cheat at cards; in the opera he is unjustly accused. No one would know from the libretto that Brétigny is a tax-farmer, and any sense of all-pervading corruption is limited to the feverish musical atmosphere of the gambling scene in the Hôtel de Transylvanie. Social criticism was not an easily marketable commodity in the period after the collective trauma of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, and if Massenet and his librettists saw any parallels between the Regency and the Second Empire, they prudently held their peace and concentrated on fashioning a gently licentious, only slightly risqué opera well calculated to appeal to Opéra Comique audiences. The only other significant change from Prevost’s novel is Manon’s death on the road to Le Havre and deportation rather than in her destination, Louisiana. In this respect Puccini was more faithful to his source. Yet fidelity to the source and to narrative values led to one slight problem: Manon is rather long, longer than Carmen, of near-Wagnerian length with well over three hours of music. It is seldom performed uncut in the theatre, but luckily this is no problem in the recording studio – all of Manon is here. For all that, it is 2 a perfectly proportioned, beautifully crafted piece of theatre. It took more time to reach its final form than Massenet would have the world believe in Mes Souvenirs, which is calculated to give the impression of bewildering facility – almost as though the composer wrote the notes down in one go, and published them as perfect entities before they even reached the stage. This is far from true: Massenet made copious adjustments to his operas after their premieres, in two cases (Thaïs, Sapho) adding crucial, clinching scenes. Manon’s Gavotte, one of the opera’s hit numbers, was inserted a year after the premiere, along with the reprise of ‘N’est-ce plus ma main’ in the final scene. Further changes were made after Massenet met the Californian soprano Sibyl Sanderson in 1887; he adjusted vocal lines for her, coached her for her debut in the title role, and later wrote Esclarmonde and Thaïs for her. He wrote the Fabliau as an alternative to the Gavotte for Georgette Bréjean-Silver in a major revival at the Opéra-Comique in 1894 ; hence the ‘definitive’ edition of 1895 was not published until more than ten years after the opera’s premiere. Despite these tinkerings, Manon does indeed give the impression of the spontaneity and freshness at which the composer always aimed. It is officially designated an opéra comique, though there is hardly any spoken dialogue. In its place there is mélodrame, or ‘voice over’, a technique later much favoured by Hollywood. The first meeting of Manon and the Chevalier Des Grieux is composed as mélodrame, their shy, halting words heard over the sweet 6/8 melody on solo violin that is to become the main tune associated with their mutual passion. It would hardly be an exaggeration to dub it one of the most telling portrayals of love-at-first-sight in all dramatic literature. The little scene for Des Grieux and his father in Saint Sulpice, in 3 which the latter gently urges his wayward offspring to settle down with a suitable wife rather than take the cloth, is another perfectly conceived passage, moving from dialogue to mélodrame to arioso and back again. The barbed conversation on the Cours-la-Reine for Manon and the Comte Des Grieux that leads to the confrontations at Saint Sulpice, conducted to the accompaniment of the off-stage minuet, is yet another example of a composer honing his technique to perfection in the matter of telling a story through music. Yet technique alone has never won an opera lasting popularity. Massenet isn’t just telling a story through music, he is telling it specifically through melody – in this respect Manon is on the same level of inspiration as Carmen. Tunes, really good tunes, come tumbling out one after another, not just Manon’s Gavotte but her glitteringly hedonistic ‘Ce bruit de l’or’ in the gambling scene, the suavely teasing accompaniment to the Letter Scene in the Rue Vivienne (an address not to be found in Prévost, but where Massenet’s publishers were based), Des Grieux’s agonised ‘Ah ! fuyez !’ in Saint Sulpice, the ensuing duet ‘N’est-ce plus ma main’, and Des Grieux’s twice repeated ‘Manon, sphinx étonnant’ in the Hôtel de Transylvanie, as telling a depiction of erotic obsession as you are likely to meet. With characteristic generosity, Massenet introduces a whole new tune for the final scene at ‘Tu pleures’ before – as in Gounod’s Faust – launching into a series of reprises of melodies well worth reprising in order to wrap up, as it were, a piece of musical merchandise as perfectly calculated and packaged as any Broadway musical. Whether the repeat of ‘N’est-ce plus ma main’, inserted after the premiere, is a reprise too far is a point cheerfully argued over by Massenetistes. These tunes are slotted into the musico-dramatic fabric with an unfailing sense of timing, and the fabric is of such variety as to make complete performances all 4 the more welcome. If you start making snips in the gambling scene, then Massenet’s repeated use of the sinister little tune for the card-sharpers loses its cumulative power, and to shorten the cheerful song for the soldiers in the last act is to lessen the contrast between that and the personal tragedy about to unfold. The two bustling crowd scenes are so beautifully made that you don’t want to lose a bar of them, and to cut the slyly humorous little vignette of Des Grieux’s adoring female fans in Saint Sulpice, as sometimes happens, is approaching an operatic crime. One of the main reasons for Manon’s survival through all the ups and downs of Massenet’s reputation is that singers have always wanted to sing and indeed record it – the Manon discography is vast, with all the great singers of the century represented. Who can blame them? Quite apart from the subsidiary characters – Lescaut a rewarding role for an elegant Kavalierbariton, Guillot an absolute gift for any character tenor – the two leading roles offer untold opportunities to resourceful artists. Today a musical can survive on just one hit number, and Des Grieux alone has at least two: the Dream, whose pathos is sharpened by the audience’s knowledge that it will indeed remain a dream (they have just heard Manon bidding tearful farewell to domestic bliss), and ‘Ah! fuyez’. Adding ‘Manon, sphinx étonnant’ is almost over- generous. And in Manon herself Massenet created an eternal-feminine mystery as fascinating as Carmen, Mélisande, Violetta or Lulu, admittedly – as sterner feminists may (and do) argue – a woman definitely seen through man’s eyes.

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