Steen Great Operas of Puccini

1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78237-973-7
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 178 Seiten

This compendium of short guides to all twelve Puccini's operas is part of the author's series A Short Guide to a Great Opera.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Steen, Michael

Leseproben

MANON LESCAUT: BACKGROUND Manon Lescaut placed Puccini firmly ‘on the operatic map and was the foundation of his international fame’, although it was not his first opera1. He had already passed the age of thirty and was in need of a success when his Edgar flopped. Nevertheless, that opera showed sufficient promise for his backer Giulio Ricordi, the influential Milanese publisher who was to be ‘the architect of his career’, to continue to support him financially despite pressure from his firm’s shareholders to drop him. In a daring move, Puccini felt that he could succeed with a ‘Manon’. The story had been used several times already, by leading composers.2 A few years earlier, the French composer Jules Massenet had had a ‘phenomenal success’ with it. Eighteen years before that, there had been a Manon Lescaut by Auber, the composer of the outstandingly successful grand opera La Muette de Portici. There was a ballet as well; and similar ground had been covered in the 1830s with Michael Balfe’s The Maid of Artois, which starred the great soprano Maria Malibran. Most importantly, the financial pedigree was excellent: Massenet’s opera had enabled him to become ‘one of the richest musicians of his time’. Puccini hoped that his version would ensure him the ‘handsome income’ for which he craved and which he thought he deserved. It did. The well-known classic novel, Les Aventures du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut,3 had been written in the eighteenth century by the French author Abbé Prévost. The fictional Des Grieux was a seventeen year-old student when the stage coach arrived in Amiens taking Manon away to become a nun. In the novel, he has returned home after her death, and he tells the story to someone who, two years earlier, had kindly lent him some money when he followed Manon and the other prostitutes on their way to transportation from Le Havre to America. ‘Officially’, the novel may have provided a ‘cautionary tale’ about the conflict between reason and passion, virtue and vice; about the struggle of a man between instinct and his better self. But it was also a rollicking good story of elopement, sex, gambling, violence, murder, escape, and death. The novel was banned by the authorities when it was published. Even half a century ago, it was not considered suitable reading for secondary-school children in England. It was irrelevant that the ‘deux enfants’ intended to get married when they ran off to Paris: she was a courtesan4 – worse, just a common prostitute! – and the description of her world, her beautiful body, her lack of constancy and her overpowering love of wealth, was immoral. For Puccini, the preparation of his libretto based on this story became a nightmare. Ricordi first asked Leoncavallo, who would shortly gain international fame for his one-act opera Pagliacci, to write the libretto for him. But Puccini did not like the result. So several playwrights, journalists, and the like, were subsequently involved over a protracted period of time. After a draft was available in summer of 1890, Puccini, who loved the countryside, went to a small village on the Swiss border, near Chiasso,5 in order to compose. But it would take him three years to finish the work. Probably rightly, he was obsessed with the need for his opera to be different from Massenet’s - even to the extent of wanting a wholly different title. But Ricordi pointed out that it would be absurd for such a well-known story to be called anything other than ‘Manon’. They compromised with ‘Manon Lescaut’, a title which Puccini chose in order to distinguish his opera from Massenet’s. He continued to have trouble with the libretto. He was a painstaking perfectionist with a ‘sensational flair for theatrical effect’. He knew what he wanted and he was utterly determined to have his own way. In the end, so many pens were involved that it was decided not to acknowledge any individual librettist and the opera is simply entitled ‘Giacomo Puccini, Manon Lescaut, Dramma lirico in quattro atti’. The journalist and playwright George Bernard Shaw summed it up: ‘he has arranged his own libretto from Prévost’. The opera was composed partly in the chalet near Chiasso, partly in Lucca and partly in Torre del Lago, the village near Lucca where Puccini would eventually make his home. Puccini finished it in October 1892, after leaving act 3, the ‘Embarkation scene’ to be completed last. His score, with its large numbers of crossings out, pastings over and other changes, testifies to the immense trouble he took. Indeed, there is some difficulty in determining what he finally wanted: there are six different editions of the Italian vocal score. Manon Lescaut was premièred at the Teatro Regio, in Turin, on 1 February, 1893, nine months after Leoncavallo’s success with his Pagliacci. Turin was chosen rather than Milan because the Milanese audience might be prejudiced against Puccini after the earlier failure of his Edgar there. But the decision was no doubt greatly influenced by the imminent première, in Milan, of Verdi’s Falstaff, which would take place eight days later. Puccini’s understandable apprehension was unnecessary. His première was a tremendous success: he would never have another first night like it. The critics liked the fact that the opera was neither trivially melodramatic, nor excessively serious like Wagner’s operas. It was something they could recognise as truly Italian. At a banquet held in his honour, all he could splutter was ‘Grazie a tutti!’ London saw Manon Lescaut fifteen months later. Three months after that, there was a performance in English in Philadelphia. However it only reached New York in 1898 when it was performed in Wallack’s Theater. The London reception was comparatively cool, possibly because the title role was performed by a soprano who was ‘just a little too ladylike’, and the ‘conventional operatic death scene was so unconvincing’. It is also considerably less lyrical than Massenet’s version. Despite this, the production led George Bernard Shaw to write: ‘Puccini looks to me more like the heir of Verdi than any of his rivals’. And he was correct. The stunningly beautiful Lina Cavalieri was the first Manon Lescaut at the Met. She was killed in Italy in 1944 in an Allied bombing raid. Commentators are, however, inclined to rate Manon Lescaut behind Massenet’s version: ‘Massenet’s Manon is a masterpiece, which Puccini’s is not’, so it is said. But Manon is mature Massenet whereas Manon Lescaut is youthful Puccini. It is perhaps curious that, in Puccini’s version, there is ‘no blockbuster big and memorable tune’, which became such a feature of his later works. The part of Manon Lescaut has been performed by many divas, including Callas. It has however given some distinguished sopranos some difficulty. Of the two whores, Carmen attracts all the sympathy, whereas Manon gets little. The ‘seductive but perfidious woman’, ‘cette charmante et perfide créature’ is so mercenary, that it is difficult to warm to her. Some commentators argue that it is idiotic to criticise her - hers is a wholly realistic portrait, but in the opera she is somewhat two dimensional, at least when compared to Massenet’s Manon. Manon’s Cavaliere des Grieux carries conviction in the book, in which the story is ‘told’ by him and essentially about him. A seventeen year- old student might be expected to erupt with ‘un example terrible de la force de ses passions’. But no youth of that age could possibly sing this immensely difficult role, a veritable tour-de-force which has necessarily become the preserve of tenors of riper years, such as Björling, Caruso, Domingo and Pavarotti. Unfortunately, the tenors at times justify the comment that ‘what was ardent passion on Verdi’s stage is more like hysteria on Puccini’s’. Puccini’s characterisation is full-blooded. He does not hold back on his instructions: there are countless expression markings.6 Still, the hectic fast-moving passages and the ‘enervating languor in the slow music’, reflect the character of the composer, and provide enjoyable entertainment. At the Met, the first Renato des Grieux was Caruso   1 His first opera was Le Villi. 2 The tale endures: in 1952, Hans-Werner Henze’s opera Boulevard Solitude, based on the same story, was premièred. 3 The ‘n’ at the end of ‘Manon’ may be sounded in Italian but not in French. The ‘t’ in Lescaut is silent, so the name sounds like ‘Lessko’. Des Grieux is pronounced approximately like ‘Day Gree-er’. 4 Mistresses were of course a normal feature of life, Louis XV leading the way with his. Courtesans, les grandes horizontales, were a particular feature of Paris a century later, and have tended to be glamorised, as in Verdi’s La Traviata. A courtesan is less than a mistress because she sells her love for material benefits; but she is more than a prostitute because she chooses her...