Jules Massenet (1842-1912)
Massenet’s opera, he insisted, was primarily about ‘the perfidious darling Manon’ – not her lover Des Grieux, who tells the story in Prévost’s novel. Massenet intuited that women would identify with the impulsive, pretty Manon, who ruins a devoted lover but remains a good-hearted girl, and pays dearly. Debussy claimed Massenet had ‘an insatiable desire to find in music the necessary documents for a complete history of the feminine soul’.
Some people greet announcements of a new production of Massenet’s Manon not just with pleasure of anticipation, but with a kind of ‘in the know’ superiority. Massenet set the story better than Puccini, they say, and this will prove it. Many remain skeptical – these enthusiasts must be Francophiles, they say, or effete fans of an opera composer thoroughly out of fashion. If they are honest, most Australian opera-goers have to admit they don’t know. They may well have seen Puccini’s Manon Lescaut but have they seen Manon? Puccini, as he set out to put the Abbé Prévost’s story to music didn’t pass judgment, saying ‘Massenet treated the subject as a Frenchman, with refinement and grace…I shall treat it as an Italian, with desperate passion’. That can stand as a fair comparison of the operas, provided the desperate passion isn’t underestimated in Massenet’s treatment.
Puccini’s Manon Lescaut was his first great success, and Massenet’s Manon was by far the most popular of his operas. Both composers were on to a good thing, and the original story had a great deal to do with their success. They treat it very differently, but it can take both ways. Obviously, there’s a need to look closely at the Abbé Prévost’s tale. But why did Massenet’s Manon, an opera so successful and popular in its day and for a considerable time afterwards, go into eclipse along with all the other works of its composer.
Manon’s very success was part of the trouble. Massenet doesn’t fit the romantic idea that great composers should be unsuccessful during their lifetime. In fact, as the English critic Martin Cooper wrote, ‘Massenet’s whole nature was centred in the desire to please, and this was sufficient to damn him in the eyes of intellectuals’. It became fashionable to sneer at Manon because it set out to charm, to titillate, to shock, but only mildly. What was overlooked is the grace, the melody, the sheer theatrical effectiveness.
In any case, the past when critics sneered can be forgotten. Massenet is back, or at least Manon is, and less judgment is passed on Massenet’s presentation of the story. An English critic even observed approvingly à propos a recent revival of Manon, ‘few composers have had a greater intuitive command of the discreet art of soliciting in music than Massenet’.
Who is Manon, then? She dominates Massenet’s opera, and he insisted from the first that his story was primarily about her – ‘the perfidious darling Manon’ – rather than about her lover Des Grieux, who tells the story in Prévost’s novel. Massenet realized with sure intuition that women would identify with the impulsive, pretty Manon, who ruins and loses a devoted lover because of her love of pleasure, her capriciousness and her irresponsibility, but remains a good-hearted girl, and pays dearly for it in the end. When Massenet ran through the completed score with his first singer of the role, Marie Heilbronn, she sighed in a state of great emotion: ‘it is my life…that is my life.’
In the Abbé Prévost’s novel, not only is Manon seen through the eyes of her lover the Chevalier Des Grieux, but he is really the main character. Manon hardly changes – but his meeting her is destined to have devastating effects on the young man. So the situation is similar to Bizet’s Carmen, where Don José is the character who develops, while Carmen remains a kind of fixed force.
Just as Meilhac and Halévy, librettists for Bizet, toned down Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen, a wild gypsy sorceress and bandit’s moll, Meilhac (the same one) watered down Prévost’s narrative for Massenet. For example, in the original story Lescaut was Manon’s brother, not her cousin. He moves in with Manon and her Chevalier and sets her up with rich lovers – pimps for her, in effect. There are many other changes. Although Prévost’s is a short book and Massenet’s a relatively long opera, much of the action has had to be telescoped. This leaves some loose ends – does the Chevalier Des Grieux cheat, as he is accused of doing, in the gambling scene? If not, what reason is there for him to be arrested? Why is Manon arrested and sent into penal exile? In Prévost’s book she is a high-class demi-mondaine who defrauds her lovers, and is sent for punishment to the appalling Hôpital Général, like a common prostitute. She escapes, but an aristocratic lover she has cheated and robbed, and his elderly roué of a father, her former lover, catch up with Manon and Des Grieux. His aristocratic connections keep him out of their reach, but he can’t save her.
It’s strong, unsentimental stuff. The dramatic weaknesses, and the sentimental watering down of the story are covered over in Massenet’s opera by music’s persuasive illusion – we don’t ask questions at the time. But Massenet’s pupil, Debussy, who had some first-hand experience of Manon’s kind of life, reproached Massenet for not having been faithful to the true Manon.
Information about the original story cannot be withheld any longer. L’Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut is the seventh volume of the Mémoires d’un homme de qualité, written by the Abbé Antoine-François Prévost d’Exiles (1697-1763). The Mémoires are an immense and rambling picaresque adventure story, by a man in whose life phases of sober living alternated with wild escapades. Of good birth, he was successively a Jesuit novice, then a soldier, a Benedictine priest, and a convert to Protestantism. In 1728 he was forced to go into exile to escape imprisonment and lived in England and Holland, where he accumulated large debts and was imprisoned for forgery. Returning to France, he re-entered the Benedictine Order by consent of the Pope, and became chaplain to the Prince de Conti; but he was exiled again in 1740 for allegedly writing satiric pamphlets. From 1742 his life seemed quieter, but he had too many mistresses and too little money, and was forced to spend the rest of his life as a prolific hack writer to pay off his debts.
There are obvious parallels between the lives of the Abbé Prévost and that of his character the Chevalier Des Grieux , a weak-willed young man, essentially refined, with aspirations to the religious life. Prévost in his brief and unvarnished narrative of the fatally destined passion of Des Grieux for Manon far surpassed his usual standard. The concise story told by Des Grieux is naturalistic in tone – it describes, without moralising, the destiny of Manon and in their characters. The story is set amidst a corrupt Parisian society where money rules all.
What Massenet – and Puccini – obviously found so attractive about the story is the lovers’ obsession (especially his) and the force of the emotions. And for Massenet there was something more. Debussy again put his finger on it: ‘his insatiable desire to find in music the necessary documents for a complete history of the feminine soul: For they are all there – those females who haunt us in our dreams! Manon, in her billowing petticoats has a smile…to bring men to tears’.
Massenet’s music has been criticized, amongst other things, for being melodically short-winded (so has Puccini’s). In fact (as Rodney Milnes has pointed out) the tendency of the melodies to turn back on themselves gives them an obsessive quality, born of repetition – and Massenet is often preoccupied with obsession, especially erotic obsession.
The opera is highly effective from a theatrical point of view. For the 1880s Manon was a risqué opera. It is about ‘living in sin’, thinly disguised by being set in make-believe 18th century Paris rather than the up-to-date Bohemian Montmartre chosen later by Massenet’s pupil Charpentier for his Louise. Manon is faithlessly promiscuous, and there is the extra thrill: that her deceived lover adopts a religious vocation. Mock liturgical music is heard as the Abbé Des Grieux is at prayer, mingling with his aroused vision of his seductive loved one. Sure enough, she seduces him with flagrant musical enticement at the very gate of St. Sulpice Abbey. This is typical of what composer Vincent d’Indy, a high-minded artist, called Massenet’s ‘discreet and semi-religious eroticism’. But the music is – usually – saved from cheapness by Massenet’s good judgment and his craftsmanship.
Massenet reveals in his Recollections, along with a welter of sentimental reminiscences, through incredibly rose-tinted spectacles, the hard fact that he habitually worked an 18-hour day, composing. He had genuine talent and he got to be very good at it. Saint-Saëns said Massenet’s music was ‘original, without being odd, and entertaining without being trivial, and that is more than one needs for success’. Indeed.
The originality of Massenet is worth pointing out, because it may not be obvious in hindsight . Massenet’s music develops the idioms familiar from Gounod and Bizet, but there are some interesting innovations. For example, the dialogue in French opéras-comiques (such as the original version of Carmen) was spoken. Wanting to alternate speech and song without breaking the musical continuity, Massenet introduced brief passages of dialogue, spoken over a lightly scored orchestral accompaniment. Without in any way adopting a Wagnerian style, Massenet used leading themes associated with each character in various moods, and often made affecting use of these themes as reminiscences – especially the themes of the lovers’ first meeting, their happiness together in Paris, and Manon’s winning back of Des Grieux.
Manon has an 18th century setting, and in the music there’s an element of pastiche – using dance metres, as in Manon’s Gavotte, and delicate textures colored by wind instruments, representing the 19th century idea of the elegant world of Louis . This near-pastiche is particularly prominent in the Cours-la-Reine scene. When Manon meets Des Grieux’s father there, the music mirrors with great psychological perception her wavering between brittle but glittering self-assurance vis à vis her worldly companions, and emotional disturbance as she inquires after his son, with still smoldering love.
Massenet’s sure craftsmanship knits the diverse musical elements into a unity. Even the sentimentality is handled with discretion. Massenet is admired by many even of the most fastidious French musicians for his layering of the desire to please, the delight in the polished surface of things, with, underneath, the sensibility, sometimes the sentimentality. Romain Rolland claimed that in the heart of every French composer there lies a slumbering Massenet
It would be unfair to judge Massenet’s achievement only on the strength of Manon, an early work. Perhaps if he had set the story later in his career, he would have wanted a libretto like Puccini’s, preserving the ending of Prévost’s story in the North American wilderness, rather than transposing Manon’s death to the embarkation at Le Havre. Puccini was seized with the possibilities of this part of the story for verismo treatment. Massenet’s later operas cover a wider range of emotions and subjects of more depth. In La Navarraise he even wrote out-and-out verismo opera.
But while Manon doesn’t represent the whole of Massenet’s art, it is extremely characteristic of his personality, and perhaps that is why its effect is so memorable. Debussy certainly had the master well summed up: ‘his music is vibrant with fleeting sensations, little bursts of feeling and embraces that we wish would last forever. The harmonies are like arms, the melodies like the napes of necks. We gaze into the ladies’ eyes, dying to know their thoughts’. Debussy adds, not altogether sardonically, ‘Massenet bravely continues to court the affections of his lady admirers, as he has always done.’ There will always be some people who can’t stomach music revealing such a personality. They will share the reaction of an English critic who wrote of a Sadlers Wells production in 1947: ‘Manon in fact is only tolerable in France, and even then only after a superlatively good dinner, which should end with a Château D’Yquem’. By 1912, the year of Massenet’s death, at the Opéra-Comique alone, they had patronized over 760 performances of Manon.
First published in Opera Australia, 1982