Manon (Anna Netrebko) as fashion plate
Dear friends and readers,
Today’s HD Massenet’s Manon was a disappointment. This is an opera adapted from one of the great 18th century novellas, Prevost’s Manon Lescaut (an inset historical tale in Mémoires et aventures d’un homme de qualité). It’s a brief story of two passionate lovers who refuse to be coopted by the established order of the time, which decree (as the novella opens), her a prostitute, fodder for prison gangs, and him a priest, fodder for his family’s position. In an impulse, they flee to try to make a life together and fail for lack of funds and anyone to help them; he turns to unscrupulous gambling and she to supporting them by luring lover-protectors. Abducted by his father (lettres de cachet operative), he is for a time forced into the priesthood, but rebels, turns back to her, and we watch them gradually degenerate until now amoral crooks (the novel parallels Defoe’s Moll Flanders which it’s contemporary with) they must flee the police and end up in an imagined desert in Louisiana where she dies in his arms. An analogous point of view (“I will not serve”) is found in the mid-century equally passionate-subversive Sorrows of Werther by Goethe (also adapted into an opera by Massenet) and in the 20th century has been successfully imposed on Mozart’s Don Giovanni (see Claus Guth: “taking refuge in the pastoral”). When staged and performed to dramatize this core spirit, it is an ironic tragic release: and this is how it was done for HD transmission in the Gran Teatre del Liceu at Barcelona, as a Roman noir, with Natalie Dessay and Rolando Villazon as Manon and her Chevalier.
The staging, implied motivations, costumes and gestures we saw today turned this opera into a series of mostly fatuous and/or improbable manic scenes whose explanatory connections occurring over periods of time were presumably off-stage. About 2/3s of the opera was meant to be done (we were told in the intermission) in a “light-hearted” way: so we begin with a jokey opening in which we watch two young people fall hopelessly unbelievably sentimentally in love at first sight (and thus flee without their suitcases):
Des Grieux (Piotr Beczala) and his teenage Manon (Anna Netrebko),
Curtain closes and then opens on a scene of the two of them in some never-never land on a rigged platform with bed, door, and a small table (so as to visualize a famous line in an aria) in which she betrays him with little trouble for her cousin’s friend on the assumption that this way she will live in luxury and be adored (by rows of men). Intermission and then we are “treated” to an Easter parade of women dressed in lovely belle-like outfits and hoards of men in tuxes whose foscus was an ostentatiously expensive dress and hat for Netrebko (see above). Not happy apparently (suddenly) when told that Des Grieux may now be found at St Sulpice, the curtain goes down and a few minutes later comes up on rows of pews, a pillar and alter (chorus of women in black) where she, Satan-like (she slithers on the floor at one point), seduces the now religiously devout Grieux into bed with her. This end on rare visually startling moment where they clutch one another in a pose of tight fucking on a conveniently nearby bed (behind the pillar).
The shaping idea of this production was young people just want to have fun.
There was some intelligent feeling and moving singing by Beczala in the scene on the platform as he appears to have read and taken seriously the words of his aria wistfully longing for some meaningful loving relationship in a haven far away. The parade did include a ballet by woman dancers which (inconsistently) ended with individual abonnés (upper class males in tuxes who in the 1890s hung around the Paris Opera, pressuring girls to succumb to their desire for sex by paying them) literally forcing the struggling ballerinas off the stage to their lairs. Perhaps this was the most moving sequence in the whole 4 hours. Otherwise except for the sexual clutch, it was everyone going through conventional comic and pathetic routines.
Until the last third of the opera that is. Then we swung us into the melodrama begun in the St Sulpice scene, with a simplified lurid gambling den set before us in which Manon now pressures Des Grieux into gambling because she (he is told) will not live with him unless he is rich. As in her St Sulpice scene she is trussed up into a gown which highlights (outlines) her breasts and hips, this time the lurid color is fuschia:
(I’ve chosen a less revealing pose than the one the posters for this opera have made ubiquitous on ads)
Des Grieux is accused of cheating (which of course he’d never dream of in this production) and she (for reasons which remain unexplained) taken away by the police. The last scene of all is her in a tramp’s shirt and long jacket which seem torn left-overs from a Waiting for Godot production. She is dumped by gendarmes on a vast floor and dies in Des Grieux’s arms. (He has been standing about waiting for her – waiting you see.) Her face was at long last not so clownish with lipstick that went beyond her lips. Backstage in the intermission Netrebko lamented that she had to wear this least of her outfits when she went our for applause.
The lesson of his opera is be sure and attach yourself to someone with a permanent income? Maybe it was a fashion show in disguise, except for that (according to Nebtrebko) lamentable final outfit?
Not exactly what Prevost had in mind, nor even Massenet — though recently a Eurotrash version, did it this way to make fun of, or send up the opera. I admit I don’t know what Massenet had in mind but since he was also attracted to Werther (a puzzled NPR reviewer) maybe he did have some sense of the subversion of these two 18th century novels.
I am glad I wrote a review of the earlier Dessay-Villazon pairing (Samuel Ramey was Grieux’s father) because at first I was blaming Anna Netrebko as dull: I have found in other operas that she leaves me cold as she did here. I found myself moved by her in Anna Bolena only at the close of the opera where it was really the long experience itself that got to me. Jim thinks beyond her suave voice, she is liked because she is young and smooth-skinned and round. She does have dignity. This time though it was not her fault the opera was ho hum. Piotr Beczala’s moving singing was appreciated by the audience which stood up for him and applauded very loudly every time he came forward. But one swallow does not a summer make. Or even a couple. A few other people sang well and gave the piece some emotional or ironically comic resonance.
Izzy seemed bored when I asked her how she felt about the opera, and Jim kept saying well, “this is the level of a Massenet opera. You must not expect depth.” While I’m tempted to say that this is an opera for the year 2012, where many dramas seem intent on dramatizing how the 99% sits in worship of the 1%, I suspect this production is rather a casualty of the determination of the Met management to reach the widest possible common denominator audience. Two years ago Paul Gelb (now the man in charge of the Met who had the idea of making huge sums and gaining a new audience by HD broadcasts) seemed enamored of making the Met resemble Broadway productions. This year Gelb has opted for “traditional” stagings gussied up by huge expenditures (as in the machine for Wagner’s Ring). This time he went too far, too mindlessly. The production and costumes were both by Laurent Pelly and the directing for HD Gary Halvorson (whose name appears as HD director for most of these operas and yet is never interviewed). We did notice the theater was not as crowded as we have seen it, so despite the usual hype reviews, word had possibly got out that this was an opera you could skip.
Read Prevost’s book instead. It’s not very long. In French it’s a poetic gem in prose.
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
I love the music in Massenet’s Manon and love some parts of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut. Mary Lynn reminded me she read it in the original French and I guess it will be my next French book. I will probably be hanging over my dictionary. This was a thoughtful blog and I thank you for it.
The nearest theater to us showing Met HD broadcasts is located over an hour from us, so we must be content with the Met’s internet player.
I have seen operas in Denmark, England, Germany, New York,
San Francisco and Atlanta and have been enchanted by most of them. The operatic experience I remember the most was when I was a junior faculty member at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. I was on a a small salary but won two tickets in an opera-trivia contest through the local classical radio station.
The opera was performed by a Canadian opera company traveling in the U.S. and the venue was a basketball arena. The opera was La Bohème and we dressed to the hilt to see it. The performance was very good and it was a magical experience.Art can create these magical experiences even in the provinces.
John Ryland
IN response to John, Jim read my blog and said even though the Barcelona version of _Manon_ was the one I was so moved by and thought true to Prevost’s text and relevant to our times, alas, it was probably true that this Met production was much closer to what Massenet intended.
I found the aria at the end of the first act sung by Des Grieux, and the lyrical seduction song at the end of the second by Manon the two beautiful-memorable pieces.
Jim thinks a lot of later 18th century French opera pretty bad when it comes to story and ideas. He instanced Esclarmonde, which he and I saw at the Met or the City Opera in the 1970s, asking me didn’t I think it was the worst opera we ever saw. A 3 hour adulation of Joan Sutherland (O divine Esclarmonde):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esclarmonde
I didn’t think it came “up” to the movie Jason and the Argonauts which is my standard for the worst ludicrous nonsense one can see in the arts.
At first Jim did not want to go to these HD operas and we missed the first two years. He really doubted they’d come up to what we had experienced in the opera houses in NY and a couple of other places we’ve been (London a number of times, once in Paris). But he was proved wrong. In fact to me these are much more enjoyable, both the ones from the Met and the ones from European houses (without all the hype and “explanations” [mostly hype]). I can see and understand them; I know what’s happening. It’s like play-going.
I agree that the best experiences we can have do not have to be in numinous places or famous prestigious ones. My favorite memory of an opera is the very first I ever saw: Leeds City Opera house [or Theater] where we saw and heard a local amateur production of _Marriage of Figaro_. I loved it. It remains a favorite opera. Were all operas done the way this one was, were the content and music like this of Mozart’s, I’d never fall asleep. It was also probably among Jim and my first official dates, meaning when we made an appointment to meet, met, ate out, and then went out somewhere together.
Immodest as it is, I was told by a young woman who I had in a class at the Northern Regional Center for continuing University of Virginia learning that what we were doing and what was said was superior to anything she had experienced at William and Mary. That was the only time I ever taught an advanced Eighteenth Century Course. It was the old-fashioned type, now gone, called “The Augustan Age” (first half of 18th century).
Ellen
[…] when he suggested the production was trying for a a noir twist. To be fair to Puccini, I found the Met HD Massenet Manon similarly misconceived. Both critics, though, made the same point that my daughter, Izzy, dwelt on as what made the opera […]