3. Acquiring a style.

The circumstances surrounding Manon Lescaut were very complicated. Leoncavallo, Praga, Domenico Oliva, Giacosa and Ricordi all worked on the opera from 1889, but in 1891 Luigi Illica took charge, strengthening the parts which Puccini found weak, without altering others for which he had already composed music. Illica introduced a few minor characters, made the beginning of the third act more lyrical and suggested a finale ‘alla marinesca’. But above all he solved the problem of the chorus by converting it into a roll-call of prostitutes (Act 3). Working out a detailed plan, he enabled Puccini to transform what was to have been a static pezzo concertato into an ensemble of action (something Verdi had set out to achieve in the third act of Otello, but without success).

With Manon Lescaut Puccini’s genius caught fire. After the near-failure of Edgar, he resolutely tackled the problem of drama in music postulated by Wagner, combining the technique of the leitmotif with the Italian concept of the dramma in musica, in which melody was the main support. In the first act of Manon Lescaut Puccini went beyond the limits of the genre, skilfully adapting symphonic structures to the demand of the action. The thematic material used in the opera sets up a network of relationships, linking characters to real situations and emotions, with the result that the music often plays a dominant part, freeing itself from the requirements of the narrative to suggest sophisticated symbolic associations. A good example of such flexibility is the name-theme (‘Manon Lescaut mi chiamo’), first heard when Manon’s carriage arrives in Amiens in Act 1. Puccini took this theme and varied it like a leitmotif, repeating it at key moments of the action, almost as if it contained in essence the heroine’s own future and that of her lover. The precision with which Puccini links tonality to the articulation of recurrent themes and melodies further reveals his deliberate dramatic intentions.

Puccini generally delineated from the opening bars of his operas the atmosphere in which the action was to develop. In Manon Lescaut he sketched the historical local colour of the 18th century, particularly its lecherous and hypocritical aspects. The opening theme of the opera is drawn from his own three minuets for string quartet (1884), and suggests the musical style of the period. In the first part of the second act, the life of the boudoir is depicted: the gallantry of the courtiers is contrasted effectively with the combination of passion and corruptibility that dominates the lovers’ duet.

In the opera’s devastating conclusion, in the desert of Louisiana, the composer emphasizes the central theme – love understood as a ‘curse’ and a passion of despair – by introducing his first example of ‘music remembered’, as he was to do in an equally unforgettable way on the deaths of Mimì, Butterfly and Angelica. Themes already heard follow each other, integrating the past with the present. Such restriction in thematic invention produces a compact poetic unity to the opera. The music has no need to describe anything because all that happens is the logical result of what we have already seen. The end of Manon is the inevitable consequence of her way of life and is thus a metaphor for love, just as the desperation of Des Grieux is not his alone but that of the entire audience who witness the death.

A masterpiece of late Romanticism, the fourth act of Manon Lescaut brings to mind the endings of Don Carlos and Aida. At the same time it makes evident the enormous difference separating it from the melodramme of Verdi, in which death was the only option for characters prevented from realizing their legitimate earthly aspirations. ‘I do not want to die’, Manon cries in her isolation. Until the end, the lovers look for impossible ways of escape, because the only certainty is life. Such values, desperate and sensual, belong to the restless fin-de-siècle. With Manon Lescaut, Puccini’s financial problems came to an end.

Puccini: (5) Puccini, Giacomo