Manon, by Jules Massenet, at the
Metropolitan Opera House, New York.
If a theme can be said to mark the first part of the Metropolitan
Opera’s present season, it must be that of the diva in top form.
Denyce Graves’s opening-night Carmen got matters off to a good
start, yet her well-received performance was to be followed by even
more highly praised turns: Deborah Voigt’s commanding Ariadne, Jane
Eaglen’s magnetic Turandot, Cecilia Bartoli’s winning Cenerentola,
and Renée Fleming’s coy, cool, and cruel Manon. Of these, Fleming’s
outing was particularly interesting, for Jules Massenet’s Manon
features a female lead of startling complexity. It is a role that
requires a soprano to coax
both sympathy and loathing from an
audience, and it has never been an easy part to sing.
Though Auber and Puccini also wrote operas based on the Abbé
Prévost’s novel L’histoire du chevalier des Grieux et Manon
Lescaut (1731), it is Massenet’s version that has consistently won
audiences’s hearts. The reasons for this should be clear to anyone
who has seen or even heard the work, for Massenet’s lively yet
elegant score, which is liberally sprinkled with musical homages to
the eighteenth century, makes for veritable ear candy. Everything—from the
lusty prelude so evocative of provincial France, to the declamatory
romantic spasms that mark the work’s denouement—beguiles the
listener. And in between the young Manon’s arrival on the stage and
her untimely, disgraceful death come some of the loveliest arias
ever written: “Je suis encore