[Met Performance] CID:261010



Manon Lescaut
Metropolitan Opera House, Sat, March 29, 1980 Matinee Telecast Telecast
Broadcast Matinee Telecast Telecast





Manon Lescaut (142)
Giacomo Puccini | Luigi Illica/Giuseppe Giacosa/Marco Praga/Ruggero Leoncavallo
Manon
Renata Scotto

Des Grieux
Plácido Domingo

Lescaut
Pablo Elvira

Geronte
Renato Capecchi

Edmondo
Philip Creech

Innkeeper
Mario Bertolino

Solo Madrigalist
Isola Jones

Madrigalist
Suzanne Der Derian

Madrigalist
Susan Ball

Madrigalist
Joyce Olson

Madrigalist
Janet Wagner

Dancing Master
Andrea Velis

Sergeant
Julien Robbins

Lamplighter
John Carpenter

Captain
Russell Christopher


Conductor
James Levine


TV Director
Kirk Browning





Telecast: Live From The Met
This performance was broadcast and telecast live to Europe. It was later televised in the United States.
Available for streaming at Met Opera on Demand
Rebroadcast on Sirius Metropolitan Opera Radio

Review 1:

Peter Conrad in The New Statesman (UK)
Two Hoydens

In alternation with the Met's performances of its new “Manon Lescaut” the New York City Opera across the plaza at Lincoln Center has this month been playing its production of “Manon.” The contrast between these two musical incarnations of Prévost's hoyden is fascinating. Massenet's Manon is a prancing flirt, for whom love is a feckless hedonistic delight. As always in Massenet, sex approximates a perfumed and uneasy sanctity: the man, Manon beguiles, des Grieux, turns to the church to save himself from her, and becomes an eloquently sanctimonious abbe. Puccini's Manon Lescaut, however, is no trifling cocotte: she's violent, visceral and profane, like a rapacious d'Annunzio heroine. When “Manon Lescaut” had its premiere in 1894, a decade after” Manon,” an Italian critic described it as ‘the song of our paganism'.

Sex in “Manon Lescaut” is at once a vital glory and a vile degradation. The worst Massenet's Manon does to des Grieux is to entice him away from his claustration at Saint Sulpice and cajole him into playing faro at the Hotel Transylvanie, but Puccini's heroine first inflames des Grieux and then enslaves and humiliates him. Massenet's score is an elegant pastiche of the rococo; Puccini's has the hyperbolic fury of the verismo, combined with the morbid chromaticism of “Tristan.” His version of the story is too psychologically savage to belong in Provost's 16th century, and it's appropriate that, whereas Massenet's heroine wiltingly expires at Le Havre, Puccini's should end in the parching American desert. This final scene is often derided for its offence against realism, but the desert through which Manon and des Grieux struggle is the dry heat of their own sensual derangement. Even the hiccups in the libretto serve this dramatic logic. To avoid the imputation of plagiarism from Massenet, Puccini elided the intermediary stages of the action, like Manon's impoverished sojourn in Paris with des Grieux or the events after their embarkation at Le Havre. The gaps, however, catapult Puccini's characters from one stage of abasement to the next. The elopement of Manon and des Grieux is an adolescent prank; already in the following scene she has aged into a bored and pettish courtesan. The reunion at Le Havre is an explosion of joy; but the next scene strands them as fugitives in a scorching waste.

“Manon Lescaut" is a prolonged, bitter rebarbative duet between its two principals, in which the deceit and disgust of sexual obsession is painfully exposed. Manon first ensnares des Grieux with her innocence; later, in Geronte's house, she reclaims him by mobilizing all her professional blandishments. She is the most alarming of Puccini's monsters, frigid, selfish, and incapable of genuine emotion. As des Grieux accusingly declares, Manon is 'sempre la stessa'. She can't change or grow: her dramatic function is to cause change in him. He begins as a jovial boy and ends as a groveling, demoralized wreck. Though he's dismayed by his enthrallment to Marion, he can't free himself. The orchestral allusions to “Tristan” make this a study, like Wagner's opera, of sex as a pathological affliction and a biological combat between the voracious female and her helpless male prey.

Because of this intense concentration on the tangling protagonists, "Manon Lascaut" can work only with a pair of great singing actors and, in Renata Scotto and Placido Domingo, the Met has them. I'm usually allergic to the narcissism of Scotto's acting and the dynamic affectations of her singing, but her coy trickery suits the inauthentic, posturing Manon, and her hushed delivery of the dying lament, “Sola, perduta, abbandonata", skillfully skirted both the gutsiness of conventional verismo and the ear-piercing shrieks to which she's liable when overtaxing her voice. Scotto is all self-admiring mannerism: Domingo, as befits des Grieux, is all generous, impulsive ingenuousness. At the inn in Amiens he is lyrically affable, his voice aquiver with desire: later, when his life (as he wails) has turned into a prolonged torment, he brings to the music the enraged intensity of Otello or the delirious Tristan. James Levine's conducting of the final scene seemed too indulgent towards Scotto, who was dying in an orgy of slow-motion spasms and whispered half-tones, but he manages the transition from the comic levity of the first scenes to the tragic grief of the conclusion with sure understanding. So does the designer, Desmond Heeley: his sets for Amiens, Paris and Le Havre are opulent picture-postcards, complete with bromided livestock supplied (according to the programme) by All-Tame-Animals, Inc.; but for Louisiana he has devised a starkly abstract plain with a skeletal ridge and a crimson sky.

The performance I saw was a global relay, transmitted live by satellite to television networks in Europe and the Far East. Television is rescuing the world’s beleaguered opera houses from their deficits: that same day Covent Garden’s “Lucrezia Borgia” was being telecast in this county. BBC2 has the Met’s “Manon Lescaut” on videotape and will show it soon. It oughtn’t be missed.



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