MANON AT THE OPERA: FROM PRÉVOST’S MANON LESCAUT TO AUBER’S MANON LESCAUT AND MASSENET’S MANON

VINCENT GIROUD

“Vous aimez l’Opéra: nous irons deux fois la semaine” (“You love opera: we’ll go twice a week”), Des Grieux promises Manon in Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, as the lovers make plans for their life at Chaillot following their first reconciliation.1 Opera, in turn, has loved Manon, since there exist at least eight operatic versions of the Abbé Prévost’s masterpiece – a record for a modern classic.2 Quickly written in late 1730 and early 1731, the Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut first appeared in Amsterdam as Volume VII of Prévost’s long novel Mémoires d’un homme de qualité.3 An instantaneous success, it went

1 Abbé Prévost, Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, ed. Frédéric Deloffre and Raymond Picard, Paris: Garnier frères, 1965, 49-50. 2 They are, in chronological order: La courtisane vertueuse, comédie mȇlée d’ariettes four Acts (1772), libretto attributed to César Ribié (1755?-1830?), music from various sources; William Michael Balfe, The Maid of Artois, grand opera in three Acts (1836), libretto by Alfred Bunn; Daniel-François-Esprit Auber, Manon Lescaut, opéra comique in three Acts (1856), libretto by Eugène Scribe; Richard Kleinmichel, Manon, oder das Schloss de l’Orme, romantic-comic opera in four Acts (1887), libretto by Elise Levi; Jules Massenet, Manon, opéra comique in five Acts and six tableaux (1884), libretto by Henri Meilhac and Philippe Gille; Giacomo Puccini, Manon Lescaut, lyrical drama in four Acts (1893), libretto by Domenico Oliva, Giulio Ricordi, Luigi Illica, Giuseppe Giacosa, and Marco Praga; and Hans Werner Henze, Boulevard Solitude, lyric drama in seven Scenes (1951), libretto by Grete Weil on a scenario by Walter Jockisch. Jean-Christophe Branger, Manon de Jules Massenet ou le crépuscule de l’opéra-comique, Metz: Serpenoise, 1999, 47 n.50, also lists an operetta by the Portuguese composer A.A. Lopez, Manon, performed in Lisbon in 1883. The other “modern classic” most often adapted as an opera is Faust, the difference being that Goethe did not invent the Faust legend – and in fact some Faust operas (Busoni, Dusapin) are not based on Goethe. 3 On the novel’s genesis and textual history, see Prévost, Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, Introduction, iii-xciii, as well as 205-10 and 245-57. See 240 Vincent Giroud through many editions, appearing in German translation in 1732 (and in English in 1767). As Jean Sgard has noted, the work, with its organization in five parts and its frequently dramatic dialogue, seemed to call for a stage adaptation.4 There is a prologue located in Pacy-sur- Eure, where Renoncour, the “man of quality”, encounters Des Grieux and sees Manon on her way to Le Havre prior to her deportation to Louisiana. The full story of Manon is told to Renoncour by Des Grieux on their next meetings two years later. It unfolds in four Acts, each marked by a betrayal followed by a reconciliation: having eloped with Des Grieux, Manon quickly leaves him for a rich tax collector, M. de B...;5 the lovers are reunited two years later after Manon has presented herself at the Saint-Sulpice seminary where Des Grieux is studying for the priesthood, but at her brother’s urging she soon accepts the favours of the old M. de G... M..., who has Manon and Des Grieux arrested once he realizes they are carrying on their affair behind his back; after their escape, Manon leaves Des Grieux for the son of G... M..., which results in a new arrest and Manon’s deportation; Des Grieux follows Manon to New Orleans, where the governor’s nephew, Synnelet, falls in love with her and is seriously wounded in a duel with Des Grieux; the lovers escape but Manon, exhausted, dies en route. This neat construction notwithstanding, Manon Lescaut (as the work came to be known) could not be easily adapted as it stood. The thrice-repeated pattern of betrayal and reconciliation, so striking and effective in the novel, would not work so well on the stage.6 A second and more serious obstacle was the immorality of the story. “I am not surprised”, Montesquieu noted, “that this novel, in which the hero is a rogue and the heroine a whore ..., is so successful; because all the bad also Allan Holland, Manon Lescaut de l’Abbé Prévost 1731-1759: Étude bibliographique et textuelle. Avec le fac-similé de l’édition d’Amsterdam-Leipzig, Arkste’e et Merkus, 1742, Geneva: Slatkine, 1984. 4 See Jean Sgard, “Manon avec ou sans camélias”, in Littérature et opéra, eds Philippe Berthier and Kurt Ringger, Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 1987, 81. 5 Prévost’s use of initials rather than full names suggests a roman-à-clef and various identifications have been proposed, none conclusively. By the same token, the autobiographical element has never been persuasively established. 6 Prévost himself clearly saw the need to make this repetitive pattern a little less rigid since, in his 1753 revision, he introduced the episode of an Italian prince whose courtship Manon rejects. See Prévost, Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, 117-24 and Variants, 231.