Puccini - Manon Lescaut (Vienna, 2022)

Giacomo Puccini - Manon Lescaut

Wiener Staatsoper, Vienna - 2022

Francesco Ivan Ciampa, Robert Carsen, Asmik Grigorian, Boris Pinkhasovich, Brian Jagde, Josh Lovell, Artyom Wasnetsov, Marcus Pelz, Ilja Kazakov

Wiener Staatsoper Live Stream - 7 February 2022

I'm always hopeful that with the right team it might prove to be a revelation, but thus far I've never been totally convinced by Puccini's Manon Lescaut. The composer never seems to fully invest you in the rather disjointed drama or the opera's emotional journey, nor have I yet seen any director make a convincing case for it on the stage. The opera is not without some of the qualities that would become more refined in La Bohème and beyond, but it's just not quite there. If there's a good reason to make a case for Manon Lescaut, it's got to be in the choice of soprano, as Manon has a fine selection of arias to display her range. Vienna at least have that with Asmik Grigorian, and - for me anyway - that's enough of a reason to give Manon Lescaut another airing, even if the opera still proves unconvincing elsewhere.

Rather disappointingly, if not unexpectedly, the usually capable director Robert Carsen isn't able to find anything new to say about the work or indeed able to find any way of making work as a coherent opera. What he does manage to do is modernise the otherwise old-fashioned Belle Époque setting of the pitfalls that face a young woman of her age looking for fulfillment in life and love. Carsen doesn't vary from the idea that she can have either riches or true love in poverty but not both. As a prototype for Mimi, she rejects her brother's plan to either put her in a convent or marry into a profitable but loveless marriage, and runs away with the handsome but poor Des Grieux. She becomes dissatisfied with her choice however, and discovering that love alone is not enough, she is seduced by the big city glamour of Paris and led into a life of dissolution.

It's perhaps not the most enlightened of views of female emancipation - the third act conclusion makes her pay for it is a drastic way - but there is certainly still some truth in the idea of the seduction of glamour. The emphasis in the set design of the Vienna production is very much aligned to a more modern view of that idea. Manon arrives in Act I against the elegant curve of a mall of designer shops, but rejects all that for the penniless Des Grieux who charms her. Act II takes place in a penthouse city apartment and Act III doesn't end up in the Utah desert either, but back again in the no less soulless location of the mall of designer shops.

As we never see her living in poverty in a room with a tiny table in Puccini's version of the opera, (Massenet has a better choice of scenes from L'Abbé Prévost’s original novel 'L’Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut in his verion, Manon) there is none of the kind of contrasts that would contribute to the Puccinian colour of La Bohème, albeit in a single milieu there. Here, the composer tries to enliven and add variety with choruses of onlookers and dancers in Act I, and with maids and hangers-on a kind of bohemian world in Act II, but he doesn't invest in it to the same emotional charge as you find in his greater works.

That inevitably feeds into the performances, with there being 'little room' for Des Grieux to show how he has been likewise seduced only by the glamour of Manon and the romance of running away to Paris. A good singer who is well directed can perhaps bring more to it, but while it is sung well here by tenor Brian Jagde, it lacks that emotional investment. Carsen tries to bring a rather more realistic contemporary view to Manon's relationship with Geronte as one now more familiar between an aspiring female actor and a possessive powerful man who wants to control her. Rather than being arrested by the police at the end of Act II for moral corruption or theft of jewellery then, neither of which are convincing in a modern context to justify transportation to America, Manon is instead brutally raped by Geronte in front of her lover Des Grieux at the end of Act II. That ought to bring more of an emotional charge and sympathy for her fate, but it lacks edge you might expect.

Perhaps that's because the opera still feels incomplete, as if there is a whole act or a few scenes missing. It never flows in any way that you can relate to the characters and what they are going through. Carsen doesn't manage to improve on that with the minimal set changes to the three acts. The curve of the stage remains at the port in Act III where Manon is due to deported. Why the soft furnishings of the previous act remain on the stage I'm not sure. The parade of women lining up to take to the prison ship walk out with handcuffs but look bruised and beaten but still hold themselves like glamorous models on a catwalk being photographed by bystanders and press on one side and Geronte's high society friends on the the other.

I suspect that Robert Carsen is trying to say something about consumerism and the commodification of women, which is at least something even if it doesn't fit all that neatly with the characterisation or musical content. Act IV, which is always the strangest scene of the opera, feeling out of step with what has come before, doesn't take place in the American desert of course, but back again in an empty mall. With mannequins in the windows of the designer shops and abandoned shopping bags and cash littering the ground, it does emphasise to some extent the commodification of women, dehumanised for the use and mistreatment of men who hold all the power.

If that idea has any validity and works to some extent in this production, it's almost entirely down to the emotionally charged music that Puccini has written for the finale and Asmik Grigorian's singing of it here. Her rise to leading roles in major European opera houses and festivals is well merited, displaying a strength and wide range that is capable of singing Wagner, Strauss and Janáček. She has no trouble with Puccini, which certainly has its own challenges particularly in Act IV, and Grigorian is fairly stunning here.

There is a lively spring to the score under the musical direction of Francesco Ivan Ciampa; a simmering fire always there, the romantic sweep of the Intermezzo, a crash of danger as love and romance turn to horror. Being Puccini, it's hard not to get swept away by the crescendos of the final Act, particularly when it is sung well. Boris Pinkhasovich, Brian Jagde and Artyom Wasnetsov give capable performances as Lescaut, Des Grieux and Geronte, but none of the roles have opportunities for much development. To be honest, I think I had already long ago given up on Manon Lescaut as a successful opera and it was only the opportunity to see Asmik Grigorian sing the role that held any interest. She doesn't disappoint, but the opera and the production do, yet again.

Links: Wiener Staatsoper Live Streaming

Puccini - Manon Lescaut (Munich, 2015 - Webcast)

Giacomo Puccini - Manon Lescaut

Bayerische Staatsoper, 2015

Alain Altinoglu, Hans Neuenfels, Kristine Opolais, Markus Eiche, Jonas Kaufmann, Roland Bracht, Dean Power, Christian Rieger, Ulrich Reß, Christoph Stephinger, Petr Nekoranec, Evgenij Kachurovsky, Okka von der Damerau

Staatsopertv

While it's always interesting to see what the Bayerische Staatsoper come up with in their efforts to reinvent and revitalise familiar opera works, sometimes I think they try too hard and end up missing the point. In the case of Hans Neuenfels' productions, the approach is undoubtedly well-considered, purposeful and usually has something meaningful to say about the works themselves, but it rarely does the work any favours. In the case of Manon Lescaut, the attempt to explore and comment on the work itself seems to miss the main point that opera is to provide dramatic as well as musical coherence. And entertain. Much of those vital aspects were missing from the new Munich production.

Then again, although it is rapidly finding its way in recent years into the Puccini canon and has undoubted merits, Manon Lescaut is far from perfect and has evident musical, dramatic and structural flaws. It's infuriatingly lacking in any kind of through narrative and, set as a number of almost standalone acts that make it more Scenes from Manon Lescaut, there are huge gaps in the narrative that lead to inconsistent characterisation. It's structured much like La Bohème then, but Puccini would make up for it there with the most extraordinary arias, melody and melodrama. In Manon Lescaut, you rely on either knowledge of the Abbé Prévost original or - more likely - you can fill in some gaps from familiarity with Massenet's more satisfying version of the work, Manon.

Most obviously and fatally, there's a whole act missing between Act I and Act II of Puccini's version. Des Grieux and Manon run away to Paris after their meeting at the end of Act I. Act II then starts with Manon established as the mistress of Geronte. There's no scene to show the brief period of happy poverty of her time in Paris with Des Grieux that becomes so important a bond that it brings them back together and persuades Manon to (almost) give up her life of luxury in Geronte's apartment. It's alluded to but never shown, making what follows - not least the bizarre out of nowhere Act IV scene of them dying in the Utah desert - much harder to relate to or piece together.

Considering that there is nonetheless some terrific music and situations even within this mangled adaptation of the story, most productions and directors tend try to make the most of it and strive to give it a greater coherence. Not Neuenfels. His production seems to follow my own personal dissatisfaction of the work by following it to the letter and letting it stand in its own imperfect state. The bare minimalist stage for Act I, for example - lit only by a box-like neon frame - shows the characters and the setting as something unsubstantial and vacant. Act II gains nothing much more than trinkets in a room with no walls and a floating ceiling, with chorus figures and secondary characters dressed and behaving absurdly. By the time we get to Act IV in the desert, the stage is again completely bare.

According to Hans Neuenfels, his production is an attempt to reach an "emotional truth", but it seems more of a commentary on the weaknesses of the work itself than an attempt to mitigate against its failings. It also seems to either ignore the deeper "emotional truth" in Puccini's musical compositions, or else - and it's a valid response - doesn't find them to hold any real emotional content. I don't think the latter is the case, personally, and I don't really think that's what Neuenefels believes either. It's true that the orchestration and the Romantic sweep can be hugely overwrought, never really making the connection with the characters that you will find (arguably) in later Puccini works, but Neuenfels isn't consistent in his approach where the set design seems to be at odds with the musical and singing performances.

Alain Altinoglu recognises and gets across all the rich colour of Puccini's score, hammering out all its overblown dynamic and force, but it lacks subtlety. That's obviously as much as a failing with Puccini on this particular work, and you could argue that Neuenfels' minimal staging is an attempt to under-compensate, but it does leads to an uncomfortable disjoint between the music and the characterisation. The singing unfortunately isn't able to do a great deal to strike a balance between them. Kristine Opolais is a fine singer, but she doesn't have the size of voice that is required to fill out Manon's character across the range. She can't compete with Jonas Kaufmann in terms of volume evidently, but it's more than that. Unsupported on a bare stage, without Antonio Pappano's more sympathetic conducting to give her more room, those weaknesses are more evident here than in the recent Royal Opera House production opposite Kaufmann.

Jonas Kaufmann is of course still incredible, his performance just about flawless, and he's still clearly just about the most gifted tenor in the world today. He has the power to sing Des Grieux like every note of Puccini comes from a deep, meaningful place, even when it doesn't, which is the case in this insubstantial production. There's a sense that Neuenfels recognises that a credible Des Grieux might be the key to making Manon Lescaut work. Passages from his point of view are quoted at length between scenes and acts, but it's not really enough to make up for the lack of coherence in the approach elsewhere. This is exemplified beyond any question by the lack of emotional connection that results in the intense melodrama of Act IV's death scene in the desert. If that doesn't hit you hard, something has gone badly wrong somewhere, and once again Manon Lescaut fails to convince.

Links: Staatsoper.tv

Puccini - Manon Lescaut (Royal Opera House 2014 - Cinema Live)

Giacomo Puccini - Manon Lescaut

Royal Opera House, London - 2014

Antonio Pappano, Jonathan Kent, Kristīne Opolais, Christopher Maltman, Jonas Kaufmann, Maurizio Muraro, Benjamin Hulett, Robert Burt, Nadezhda Karyazina, Luis Gomes, Jeremy White, Jihoon Kim, Nigel Cliffe

Royal Opera House Cinema Live - 24 June 2014

While there isn't much hope for Le Villi and Edgar, there has at least been a concerted effort in recent years to bring another of Puccini's earliest works into the mainstream opera repertoire with numerous productions worldwide of Manon Lescaut. Puccini's first major success, the reasons for Manon Lescaut's neglect are a bit of a mystery. Antonio Pappano makes a strong case for the dramatic quality of the opera, the power of its dramatic score and the beauty of its melodies. The director of the Royal Opera House Kasper Holten suggests that it could be because it needs at least two world-class singers in the main roles, but that's also the case for La Bohème and Tosca. With Pappano conducting then and two major stars - Jonas Kaufmann and Kristine Opolais - in place and on fire for the Royal Opera House's season-closing live cinema broadcast, you would think that this new production would be a revelatory affirmation of the worth of Manon Lescaut, yet by the end of the evening, doubts about the work remain.

It seems obvious then to point the finger of blame - as many critics have been quick to do - at director Jonathan Kent, but while it is indeed difficult to follow where exactly the director is taking the story in the sets for Acts III and IV, the tone and line of the production is firmly on the side of the drama and the emotional journey of the two lovers. It's too easy to blame the production just for being modern - if the opera can't stand up to being placed in a modern context then it might well indeed be an old-fashioned work that has little to offer a modern audience and its relative obscurity is probably merited. Mariuz Treliński had a fair go at it in La Monnaie's 2013 production, so that doesn't seem to be the whole story with Manon Lescaut.

There are certain elements of L'Abbé Prévost’s original novel 'L’Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut' that are perhaps a little out of place. You'd have a bit of trouble trying to force your sister into a convent nowadays, as Lescaut intends to do here with Manon. Accepting instead an offer to selling her off to a old rich man and then into prostitution is a bit of a change of heart for Lescaut and perhaps not that a common experience that many will identify with either. The way that that this separates the young woman from the ability to make her own choices however and love the young man she chooses - the Chevalier des Grieux - has timeless resonance and, most importantly, real conflicts between the heart and material desires. Certainly none of these issues have prevented the subject from reaching modern audiences in Massenet's popular and enduring Manon.

None of it has been any obstacle either for Puccini doing much the same thing in making Mimi's dilemma - again, one that remains tied very much to the times and morals of the period - the successful and heartbreaking heroine of the romantic tragedy of La Bohème. It's clear then that this is not the issue with Manon Lescaut, or at least not the main issue. There are however certain leaps and gaps in Puccini's version of Manon Lescaut that flow less well dramatically than Massenet's version, leaving out a lot of important details. Most critically, Massenet's choice to end the work with the death of Manon at the boarding of her ship as she is being deported to America spares us what amounts to an extended death scene that lasts the entirety of Act IV in Puccini's version where Manon and Des Grieux find themselves for some unexplained reason dying of thirst and starvation in the Utah desert.

There's not an awful lot that a stage director can do to make that fit with the rest of the work. The earlier scenes may take a rather sleazy modern approach to Manon's downfall - the young woman becoming a porn-star performing for a live audience rather than a dancer - but this gives exactly the right impression of how sordid the enterprise is. Glamour is of course part of Manon's ambitions, part of the unresolved conflict that keeps the young woman from simply following her heart, but you ought to make you feel uncomfortable at how she is being exploited and that is done well. The stylised deportation of Manon and the prostitutes along a gaming table and through a poster inscribed 'Naïveté' in Act III, coming out on a crumbling road that twists towards the upper heights of the stage in Act IV (the other side of the poster forming a desert backdrop) is however as baffling as the dramatic development itself, but it at least looks great. It doesn't however in any way undermine or reduce the emotional impact of how the scene is written or how Puccini scores it.

But yet it's hard to imagine that any of this provoking a single wet eye in the house. With Kristine Opolais and Jonas Kaufmann both in superb form throughout belting out the agony of their character's dilemma, Manon coming to regret the path that has left her "sola, perduta, abbandonata"; with Antonio Pappano sensitively wringing every ounce of drama and emotion out Puccini's exquisitely beautiful and heart wrenching score; with the on-screen film direction taking us into cinematic extreme close-up in a way that both Opolais and Kaufmann can sustain dramatically as well as aesthetically; you really ought to be a quivering wreck at the end of Manon Lescaut. If that much effort is put into it however and it fails to make the necessary impact, something is very wrong. Perhaps it's all just too much.

It's not too much on the part of the singers, the director or the conductor - they are just performing what Puccini has written the way he intends it to be played - it's just that it's musically overwrought without there being enough genuine character and dramatic development put into making the audience really care for the characters. It's not necessarily that Manon is a bit of a gold-digger - Mimi is fairly mercenary in her attachments in La Bohème and we care infinitely more about her sad and lonely death - but Puccini and his numerous librettists haven't put the necessary work into establishing the romance between Manon and Des Grieux as something credible. It's significant to note that Puccini has no equivalent for the second act in Massenet's Manon showing their humble but happy home in Paris with its little table, albeit a short-lived happiness where the relationship is already in trouble. We don't really get much of an opportunity to see Manon and Des Grieux together in Manon Lescaut, and when we do in Act IV, it's too much too late.

Puccini - Manon Lescaut

Giacomo Puccini - Manon Lescaut

La Monnaie-De Munt, Brussels, 2013

Carlo Rizzi, Mariusz Treliński, Eva-Maria Westbroek, Brandon Jovanovich, Giovanni Furlanetto, Aris Argiris, Julien Dran, Alexander Kravets, Guillaume Antoine, Camille Merckx, Amalia Avilán, Anne-Fleur Inizian, Audrey Kessedjian, Julie Mossay

Internet Streaming, January 2013

The story is the same one that opera-goers will be more familiar with from Massenet's Manon (1884), but former filmmaker Mariusz Treliński's modern-day updating of Puccini's Manon Lescaut (1893) transports it into a world that will be more familiar with cinema-goers who have seen the David Lynch films 'Blue Velvet' and 'Lost Highway'.  Following on the heels of La Monnaie's similarly hard-hitting and highly acclaimed modern takes on the sordid reality of two other opera heroines who are debased by a hypocritical and exploitative patriarchal society - Lulu and Violetta - Manon Lescaut has two very hard acts to follow.  If inevitably it can't touch those outstanding productions, the fault is less to do with the casting or the direction than the fact that Puccini's early work - and his first real opera success - falls well short of Berg's and Verdi's masterpieces.

As elaborately deconstructed and as beautifully designed as it may be - Boris Kudlicka's sets matching and complementing the bright, clean, colourful neon-lit modernist productions we've come to associate with La Monnaie of late (La Traviata, Lulu, Rusalka) - Mariusz Treliński isn't able to make quite as much of an impression on Manon Lescaut, and doesn't find a method that gives any new meaning or new life to the work.  It's not for want of trying, for a lack of ideas or for any shortcomings in the material.  The Abbé Prevost's scandalous novel, banned on publication in 1731, provides plenty of scandal, adventure and colourful locations in its lurid melodrama, and these are factors that can't help but be enhanced to a considerable degree when the strange worlds of the filmmakers David Lynch and Luis Buñuel are brought into the mix.

Much of the story in this production then takes place in a railway station, or is framed by an opening and closing in a railway station with elements of it interjecting at certain points - a payphone, a bench of waiting room chairs, a subway map and timetable - in a way suggests that it might even be all taking place in the head of Des Grieux, who lies sleeping at the opening here. Trains race past through the underground station to strobing light and a digital station clock marks the passing of time, effects representing the place where the story starts and the beginning of what turns out to be a long journey for Des Grieux.  He immediately falls in love with Manon at first sight, rescuing her from a fate in a convent, or worse, left in the hands of a lecherous rich old man (Geronte de Ravoir based rather disturbingly on Frank Booth as played by Dennis Hopper with oxygen mask in 'Blue Velvet').  It's an encounter and an infatuation that, for better or worse, determines the direction of the rest of his life.

Puccini's version of the Manon story - the libretto worked on by numerous uncredited writers including Ruggero Leoncavallo and Luigi Illica - differs only in minor respects that one might consider regrettable only if familiar with the Massenet version.  The modest little table that provides such poignancy in Massenet's opera is only referred to in passing here, since Puccini's version excises the period of Des Grieux and Manon's humble little sojourn in Paris, saving Manon's arrest and deportation to America for her attempt to leave Geronte's apartment with her jewels and luxury goods when Des Grieux reappears in her life.  In Puccini's version, Manon doesn't die in Le Havre while waiting for the prison ship, but is transported to America, and Des Grieux with her, where she succumbs to a horrible death, dying of thirst in the desert outside New Orleans.  In Treliński's production, obviously, they never physically leave the train station.

Puccini makes this version very much his own, finding in it material, isolated situations at different time periods and a structure that he would put to work in a much more satisfactory manner and with considerably more artistry in La Bohème.  Musically however, although it does have some lyrical and heartfelt moments, Manon Lescaut is a much weaker work, the score almost insipid, with few melodies, arrangements or character definition that can compare to Puccini's later work.  It's unfortunate that the composer, at this stage in his career, isn't musically up to the material, because otherwise all the elements for the melodrama of the tragic Puccini heroine are all in place.  That suits Treliński, who is able to work with characters that are less one-dimensional than in the Massenet version.  His modern, fractured narrative construction recognises Manon's position as a commodity whose vanity and materialism - much like Lulu - plays a part in her fate or at least in terms of how men are able to exploit her weaknesses.  To fit with his concept however, the director imposes more emphasis on Manon as an elusive movie "femme fatale", an "Obscure Object of Desire" to fire the passions of unwary men.

Manon Lescaut is certainly a lesser Puccini work, but it's possible to imagine that it could be made to work in the right setting and with the right singers. I'm not sure however that Treliński's ideas work entirely with the nature of Puccini's scoring, and the singing in some areas seemed to have a similar problem reconciling the characters as they are defined in this production with the musical descriptions.  Eva-Maria Westbroek has the right kind of voice for the stronger Puccini heroine (like Minnie in La Fanciulla del West), but she sounded a little breathy here in places and not always fully committed to what she was singing. Treliński's directions to the singer that she must be an "impossible puzzle" and that "each scene must be played as if by a completely different actor", might not have helped matters.  When required however, she was certainly able to rise to the occasion.  Brandon Jovanovich however was simply superb, demonstrating a gorgeous tone with wonderful voice control. With that strong, lyrical voice, and a well-judged dramatic performance, he was able to be expressive in a way that brought out the impetuosity of his character and infatuation, making this production a great deal more credible that it might otherwise have been.  His indisposition on one of the nights during this run (a performance broadcast on Belgian radio) when he was replaced after the interval by Hector Sandoval must surely have been a surreal experience straight out of Lynch's 'Lost Highway' or indeed Buñuel's 'That Obscure Object of Desire' that could surely only have enhanced Mariusz Treliński's treatment.

La Monnaie's production of Manon Lescaut is available to view from their free on-line streaming service until 4th March 2013.  Subtitles are in French and Dutch only.  Their next streamed opera is Lucrezia Borgia, available for three weeks month from March 22nd.