Manon, Metropolitan Opera HD Live, April 7 2012

When Puccini set about writing his Manon Lescaut, he was cautioned that there was already an opera on the same subject, Massenet’s Manon. To which Puccini is said to have replied, “Ah, but a woman like Manon can have more than one lover.” The Abbe Prevost’s novella seems to have had at least three lovers: Massenet in his turn had been preceded by Auber, whose three-act Manon Lescaut premiered in 1856, 28 years earlier than Massenet’s.

The current production did not make a strong argument for Massenet’s version. The sets were the big problem. Our host, Deborah Voigt, explained that the setting had been moved from the 18th to the 19th century, but that remark seemed to apply only to the costumes. The sets were more like a dystopian vision of the future. The first act, in which des Grieux encounters Manon at a roadside in in Amiens, took place in a courtyard surrounded on three sides by very high concrete walls. A long staircase ascended along the back wall; along the tops of the three walls were models of apartment buildings that were dwarfed by the people who walked by them. All around the walls were concrete-colored shutters; chorus members occasionally opened the shutters and poked their heads out to sing.

The second act’s set comprised a single airy stick-frame apartment unit with steel stairs leading up to it, and in the background a fuzzy image of Paris. The first scene of the third act featured two concrete ramps, one ascending to the left and another to the right, with a higher-level platform behind them, which didn’t leave much room for the corps de ballet of the Paris Opera to perform. In this scene, Manon learns that des Grieux has taken holy orders and decamps immediately for St. Sulpice. In this production, she apparently went home first to change clothes from the elegant finery appropriate to the Cours-la-Reine into something better suited to seducing des Grieux. The church looked like a church, with stone columns and wooden chairs, except that des Grieux’s cell, with its simple bed and a pile of old books, was squeezed into a space near one of the columns. At the end of the scene, des Grieux and Manon wound up on the bed in a position that wasn’t proper for even a remote corner of a church.

Act 4 was the scene in the gambling house, and the concrete was back: concrete walls and ramps at crazy angles, all bare and stark and sterile. In the fifth and final act, Manon dies on the road to Le Havre (not in the desert outside New Orleans, as Prevost, Auber, and Puccini have it). The set was a concrete plain, with a very wide concrete ramp descending from the rear to the stage level, looking more like a concrete water channel than anything else. At the top of the left-hand wall bounding the ramp, there were four widely-spaced streetlights; at the rear of the right-hand wall was a simple building that I took to be a power plant. All in all, the sets carried no inspiration whatsoever.

Our cast:
Manon: Anna Netrebko
Chevalier des Grieux: Piotr Beczala
Lescaut: Paulo Szot
Count des Grieux: David Pittsinger
Guillot de Morfontaine: Christophe Mortagne
De Brétigny: Bradley Garvin
Conductor: Fabio Luisi
Production: Laurent Pelly

Laurent Pelly is otherwise known for his wonderful production of Donizetti’s La Fille du régiment, which inspired superb performances from the principals. Here the principals seemed to react to the uninspiring sets with uninspiring performances. There was no pizzazz. It was like a soft drink with all the fizz gone. The one possible exception was Christophe Mortagne, who dug into the role of Guillot with enthusiasm. A gamma.