Giacomo Puccini: Manon Lescaut

Giacomo Puccini wrote about himself that he was “an avid hunter of water-fowl, texts, and women”. Accordingly, women are usually assigned key parts as the heroines of his musical dramas. Puccini was attracted to the type of woman who sacrifices herself – and dies, like Mimi in La Bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, Sister Angelica, Liu in Turandot, and Manon Lescaut. He would invariably show the utmost concern for the high quality of the librettos for his operas. He worked on them with a duo of distinguished poets, Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giocosa, forming with them a threesome jokingly referred to by his publisher, Giulio Ricordi, as “the Trinity”. Their collaboration was as successful as it was exhausting and stormy, since Puccini expected the maximum from each text. The famous French novel by the Abbé Prévost, Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731), made a deep impression on Puccini in 1889. Nonetheless, his publisher Ricordi tried to discourage him from setting it, as he suspected it might be eclipsed in competition with Massenet’s Manon, dating from 1884. However, Puccini would not be shaken in his determination. In contrast to Massenet’s “French way with talcum powder and minuets”, he wished to portray Prévost’s Manon “in the Italian style”, embued with “desperate passion”. In pursuit of this goal, he involved at different times no fewer than six librettists, ranging from Ruggiero Leoncavallo, through Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. The opera’s premiere took place in Turin, on February 1, 1893, and was hailed as a triumph by both the audience and critics.

In this country, Manon Lescaut was first presented by the National Theatre in Prague, on April 24, 1894. The Prague State Opera house saw three previous productions: the first one was premiered on November 1, 1923, with Alexander Zemlinsky conducting; the second, on June 23, 1932 (both in what was then the New German Theatre); and the third, on March 13, 1980 (then Smetana Theatre), being so far the last staging of Manon Lescaut in Prague.

Premiere: May 17, 2007