Libretto
Anonymous (a collaboration among Marco Praga, Domenico Oliva, Ruggero Leoncavallo, Luigi Illica and Giulio Ricordi) after the novel Histoire du Chevalier Des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut by Abbé Antoine-François Prévost.
First performance
Turin, Teatro Regio, February 1st, 1893
Synopsis
In a square in Amiens Edmond and other students tease the girls, as they go home. Des Grieux, also a student, does not join in their banter. The Arras coach arrives, bringing Geronte, the Treasurer-General, Lescaut, a soldier, and his sister Manon. Des Grieux falls in love with her and seeks some way of preventing her entry into a convent, where her father is sending her. Geronte, with Lescaut’s connivance, plans to abduct Manon, but is overheard by Edmond. Des Grieux and Manon escape in Geronte’s coach. In the second act Manon has already been tempted to leave Des Grieux and is living a dull if relatively luxurious life with Geronte. Lescaut arranges for Des Grieux, now introduced by him to gambling, to visit her and she seeks his forgiveness. They are interrupted by Geronte and Lescaut now enters, warning them that the old man has denounced Manon to the authorities. She tries to collect her jewellery and other belongings, but is caught and arrested before she can escape. Imprisoned, she is sentenced to be transported, events covered in an orchestral interlude. At Le Havre Lescaut tries to bribe the guards to allow his sister to escape, but fails. Des Grieux, however, is able to exchange words with her, at the window of her prison. He persuades the captain of the ship that will take her and the other convicts to America to allow him to sail with them as a cabin-boy. In the fourth act Des Grieux has had a duel with the son of the French governor of the province and he and Manon have escaped, hoping to cross the desert to British territory. He leaves her, searching for water, and when he returns she is already dying, pledging him her love in her last breath.
The first performance of Giacomo Puccini’s Manon Lescaut took place at the Teatro Regio in Turin on February 1st, 1893. Puccini’s third opera is based on the novel by the abbot Antoine-François Prévost, “The Story of the Chevalier Des Grieux and Manon Lescaut,” written in 1731 and suggested to Puccini by his first librettist, Ferdinando Fontana. The libretto’s development was particularly difficult: it was not entrusted to Fontana, but to Marco Praga and Domenico Oliva. It was then passed to Leoncavallo, Luigi Illica, and Giuseppe Giacosa, to the point of prompting Puccini himself to define the libretto as “for everyone and for no one,” and the Corriere della Sera to review it as “the work of a sort of Cooperative Union of young writers.” Nonetheless, the work immediately achieved extraordinary public success, which still today seems to know no crisis.