Hailed as one of Massenet’s masterpieces, the first audiences of Manon were nonetheless struck by the hybrid nature of the work: faithful to the traditions of French comic opera in an era when the genre was slowly drifting into obsolescence, Manon seemed haunted by the memory of Rameau and Lully, yet at the same time infused with a lyricism that on occasions seemed tinged with Wagnerian overtones. The opera was Massenet’s tribute to Manon Lescaut and 18^th century France. There is an authenticity in the way the work recreates a period of history and the manner in which it expresses the most timeless of human passions.

When Massenet presented his operatic adaptation of Manon Lescaut, numerous voices reproached him for not remaining faithful to the text of Abbé Prévost’s novel. Yet it was difficult to remain faithful: one could not expect a composer at the end of the 19^th century writing an opera based on a novel dating from the reign of Louis XV to be in osmosis with his subject. Instead, he adopted an objective relationship towards it. Objective, because already, with Manon’s passage from the page to a theatre stage, the subjectivity of the first-person narrative which characterised the novel was no longer valid. Objective too, due to the historical distance which separated Massenet from the Abbé Prévost and made Manon, Des Grieux, and all the other characters, creatures of their time and exemplars of a bygone world and era.

It is therefore true that, for Massenet, composing Manon was in part a task of historical reconstruction: he needed to evoke the music of the Regency period in which the novel is set. For that, Massenet, influenced by the neoclassical aesthetic of the times which willingly looked upon the 18^th century as an age bubbling with celebrations, masked balls, and rococo hedonism, decided to give the work the allure of a pastiche by adding numerous references to the musical traditions of 18^th century France: the opera opens with a gavotte which we see repeated at the beginning of the scene on the Cours-la-Reine while the rhythm of a minuet and a passepied serve as structuring elements for Act III. Even some of the arias, such as the duet “La charmante promenade” performed by Poussette and Javotte in Act III with its two voices superimposed over a third, or Lescaut’s burlesque refrain “Ô Rosalinde, il me faudrait gravir le Pinde”, with its ornate song lines, evoke the vocal arts of the 18^th century and the style of Lully or Rameau. It is by these subtle means that Massenet achieves a form of historical verism which gives his Manon a splash of 18^th century colour.

In addition to this, the opera includes several passages of intense lyricism which correspond to the subjective effusions of the two principal characters and mark a contrast with the objectivity of the historical reconstruction: the “Louis XV” atmosphere is interspersed with moments of passion that have almost Wagnerian overtones, to the point that the first audiences of Manon were unsettled by this apparent dichotomy. Indeed, regarding the famous aria “Adieu, notre petite table” in Act II, delivered by a distraught Manon as she leaves the apartment she shared with Des Grieux, Louis de Fourcaud noted with irony that “not even Yseult could shed as many tears mourning Tristan”. Sometimes, the transition between the lightness of the recitative and the drama of the singing is achieved all but imperceptibly, around the turn of a phrase. In the scene along the Cours-la-Reine, Manon, initially caught up in all the dancing on stage, is suddenly thrown into a state of agitation by a flood of memories and an avalanche of questions: “The rococo cake crumbles at the very moment it is presented to us; the pseudo-aesthetic evocation of the 18^th century fades opposite the timeless passion of the protagonist.” (Jacques Joly)

All of this can easily be explained: this subtle balance between historic distance and the expression of timeless feelings was the real way for Massenet to show his faithfulness to Abbé Prévost’s novel by adapting it for the opera with the hindsight of 150 years of history, in an era when everything in the 19^th century stood in stark contrast with the era of the original work. In an interview in Le Figaro published on the day of Manon’s premiere at the Opéra-Comique (January 19, 1884), Massenet talked about the objective which guided him when he composed the work: Manon had to be the halfway house somewhere between Italian opera where the characters express themselves with sentences that reflect their lives, rather than through “ambient arias” and the art of someone like Wagner in which, conversely, the same sentences melt into a sea of harmony. “And this intentional contrast between the feelings of time and place and human feelings is among the effects on which I feel most able to rely”, said Massenet.

It is significant that these two trends, which in Manon are reconciled, became mutually exclusive in the operas which Massenet composed in the years that followed: in 1894, Le Portrait de Manon which tells us what happened to Des Grieux in later life, is nothing more than an ironic and nostalgic pastiche; whereas in Werther, which premiered in 1893 and is considered by some as his “Tristan”, Massenet leaned resolutely towards the master of Bayreuth, giving way to continuous melody and the overall influence of his hero’s subjectivity on the musical discourse.