Let’s put an end to this myth right here; in the original source material, the novel published in 1731, the lovers’ story ends after many days traveling in the wilderness. They were trying to make an escape from New Orleans to an unnamed English settlement somewhere far to the north. The point is that they are on their own and they are lost and alone. This production does right by that idea. It treats the final scene as “no place.” The ending, then, doesn’t become a cliché that the librettist and composer got wrong, rather it becomes an important parallel to the way we sometimes disappear into our own personal wilderness. If we mishandle our opportunities for happiness and true love we can find ourselves trapped or lost in our own imaginations. This is the real tragedy of Manon Lescaut, and it links it forever with Puccini’s other great works. It’s a cautionary tale, warning us not to ignore or dismiss our few chances at real happiness. Yes, it’s sad when these heroines die, as so often they do. But we really weep for them because they were cheated — or cheated themselves — of time and the rare opportunity to make the most of the only life they (we!) ever get. Don’t lie on that deathbed, these stories tell us, and wonder what might have been if you hadn’t let your pride, stubbornness or willful tendency to get in your own way ruin your one life. Don’t let your soul die of emotional exposure. T Mr. Cavanagh’s biography appears on page 24.
| MANON LESCAUT
2013 © Michal Daniel for Minnesota Opera
maligned or mistreated. Most often by fate or other people, like Cio-Cio-San, Tosca or Mimì, but sometimes they doom themselves, like our Manon. That she herself is the cause of so much misery does not lessen her suffering. If anything, her tendency to selfsabotage makes her suffer even more. The cycle of guilt, self-loathing and destructive behavior is a particularly toxic one. This makes Manon Lescaut one of the most complicated heroines in all of Puccini’s operas, if not all of opera itself. The superficiality that she is constantly accused of masks a complexity that makes her, ultimately, completely human. As such she is one of the hardest Puccini heroines to like — she’s so much like us that we have trouble admiring her. It’s much easier to weep for the death of the saintly Mimì or the heroic Tosca or the proud, stoic Butterfly. Maybe because of that, this opera languishes for a lack of exposure, ironically the opposite of what does in our heroine at the end. Speaking of endings, it is one of the great eye-rollers of opera that Manon Lescaut’s final scene is set in the “desert outside New Orleans.” I think this, sadly, has cost this opera a lot of its well-deserved popularity.
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