Manon is hard to love but the opera isn’t
Opera composer Jules Massenet was so attracted to novelist Abbé Prévost’s character in Manon Lescaut that he created an opera Manon based on the character in 1882. This French opera follows Manon — a charming young pleasure-loving greedy and unsophisticated woman — in a light that elicits both pity and sympathy as she careens to a degrading and unhappy end.
Artless country girl Manon is being banished to a convent. While waiting for her soldier cousin Lescaut (baritone Etienne Dupuis) she encounters Guillot a decadent old rogue and a minister in France. While he is regaling Manon with tales of his wealth and asking for her affection his nobleman friend De Brétigny (baritone Peter McGillivray) emerges from a nearby inn accompanied by three ostentatiously stylish women whom Guillot is currently keeping. Brétigny is taken by Manon’s beauty. Guillot’s friends ask him to come back to the inn but as he leaves he whispers to Manon that his carriage is at her disposal to go where she will.
Alone and still waiting for her cousin Manon sees the three women and wistfully admires their jewelry their clothes their lush lifestyle then laments that she is headed for the convent.
Enter Chevalier des Grieux (lyric tenor Richard Troxell) a handsome courtly aristocrat. Manon sits beside him unseen at first. They introduce themselves plummet into love and begin an ardent love duet and he asks her to elope. The stage is set for three men vying for Manon’s love amongst greed kidnapping betrayal and great music.
“This opera is immensely beautiful. It’s complicated in that there are moral issues at work here but beautifully dealt with in shades of grey” says stage director Brian Deedrick. “Some will find the black-and-white are not strong enough. Black-and-white is for melodrama. This one is curiously un-melodramatic.”
Making the titular character lovable is a challenge for both Deedrick and soprano Natalie Paulin who plays Manon. Despite not agreeing with Manon’s actions Deedrick says that Paulin presents the heart passion and sweetness of the young girl.
“I must say there are some rather phenomenal performances in this opera” says Deedrick. “Anyone who thinks opera is fake has to see these two (Paulin and Troxell) onstage. I am confident that the chemistry in the rehearsal is going right into the performance.”
“I cannot tell you how often I have been overcome by the way this thing pulls at my heart.”
Maintaining the essence of the story while cutting the opera down to 135 minutes from its original four-hour version (with a full ballet in the middle) has been another challenge.
There is a major re-arrangement of Manon’s famous solo Gavotte in which she expounds on her philosophy that love laughter and song should be savoured before we are too old to enjoy them. It is placed later in the opera after Manon has neglected to warn her true love about an imminent kidnapping and a few other transgressions. “The Gavotte takes on a whole different meaning and can no longer be an ode to joy” says Deedrick. “If you put it in later it has a whole lot more self-awareness behind it — more life experience — and therefore it becomes a very conscious decision to embrace youth. A tone of determination or desperation is underneath which makes it more interesting because she has had more life experience.”
Deedrick says Manon’s ultimate transgression is that she doesn’t warn her lover of an imminent kidnapping. Instead she decides to keep her mouth shut in order to receive a sizable reward. “It becomes one massive decision in our version rather than a series of slides down the slippery slope. It heightens the plot elements” he says.
