Jules Massenet and Daniel Auber had already written operas based on Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux, et de Manon Lescaut, a 1731 novel by Abbé Prévost, and when Puccini was reminded of this while composing his own opera in the early 1890s, he had a rejoinder ready: “Manon is a heroine I believe in and therefore she cannot fail to win the hearts of the public,” he said. “Why shouldn’t there be two operas about Manon? A woman like Manon can have more than one lover.” Puccini appears to be unaware of the Auber opera. He went on to add, “Massenet feels it as a Frenchman, with powder and minuets. I shall feel it as an Italian, with a desperate passion.”
The Italian Riccardo Muti brings the same desperate passion to his own 1998 recording of Manon Lescaut for Deutsche Grammophon, which you can hear on radio klassik Stephansdom’s Opernabend tomorrow, Saturday, August 22, at 2:00 pm Eastern time; Muti leads a La Scala production with Maria Guleghina in the title role, surely enough of a recommendation. “Muti conducts with great passion and much finely calculated rubato, but the recording is a touch coarse in tuttis; bringing the voices forward into a studio rather than a theatre perspective has brightened the chorus, who overwhelm the orchestra in the Act 3 roll-call,” writes Gramophone. You can stream it at the rkS web site here. (And stay tuned afterwards for music by Heinrich Schütz, Robert Schumann, and more.)
For a taste of Muti’s Manon, watch the below video of the conductor rehearsing the opera’s intermezzo with an unidentified orchestra on YouTube.
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