Manon Lescaut - The MET: Live in HD

Soprano Kristine Opolais and tenor Roberto Alagna join forces in Puccini’s obsessive love story. Opolais sings the title role of the country girl who transforms herself into a Parisian temptress, while Alagna is the dashing student who desperately woos her. Director Richard Eyre places the action in occupied France in a film noir setting. “Desperate passion” is the phrase Puccini himself used to describe the opera that confirmed his position as the preeminent Italian opera composer of his day. Met Principal Conductor Fabio Luisi leads the stirring score.

World premiere: Teatro Regio, Turin, 1893. Met premiere: January 18, 1907. Few operas have surpassed Manon Lescaut in the depiction of the urgency of young love. The French tale of a beautiful young woman destroyed by her conflicting needs for love and luxury had already inspired Massenet’sManon (1884), a relatively new and immensely popular work at the time ofManon Lescaut’s premiere. Puccini made the story his own and infused it with a new level of frank emotion and a flood of melody. The opera was his first great success, leading George Bernard Shaw to name him “the successor to Verdi.”

The first three acts of the opera take place in various locations in France, around the year 1720: the first in the town of Amiens, the second in a magnificent palace in Paris, and the third on the waterfront of the port city of Le Havre. The fourth act is set in a desolate location in the New World, an imaginary place described in the libretto as “a vast desert near the outskirts of New Orleans.” Richard Eyre’s new production moves the action to the 1940s.

Music - The work that thrust Puccini onto the international stage as Italy’s foremost opera composer,Manon Lescaut is built on lessons learned from Richard Wagner, translated into a thoroughly Italian, full-blooded thrill ride. The title character grows from a bored and pouty youth in Act II’s elegant and self-pitying aria “In quelle trine morbide” into a fully realized adult facing untimely death in Act IV’s shatteringly dramatic “Sola, perduta, abbandonata.” The orchestra plays a prominent role in propelling the action—the waves of sound during the powerful Act II love duet are among the most blatantly erotic in opera.

Duration: 188’

With English subtitles