For Shaw, Puccini's “new country” was “the domain of Italian opera […] enlarged by an annexation of German territory.” But Puccini's journey toward the startlingly new musical landscape we find in Manon Lescaut was not just by way of Bayreuth. Rather, Puccini's third opera breaks new ground in many other respects: Manon Lescaut (1893) is his first opera to have a libretto created with the active input of the composer, the first to demonstrate a specific couleur locale (here, eighteenthcentury France), and the first to involve librettists Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa (the eventual collaborators for his most successful works, La bohème, Tosca and Madama Butterfly). Musically, Manon Lescaut begins the process in Puccini's operas of exhibiting a continuous musical texture, extensive leitmotivic manipulation, the motivic parallelism of the MPI (“motivo di prima intenzione”) and utilization of the whole-tone collection.

into the wild

In this chapter we will examine the establishment and ultimate deformation of formal schemata in Manon Lescaut, and how these resonate with important aspects of the narrative. But, in order to do so, a brief look at the libretto and how it was constructed will be useful.

Abbé Prévost's Histoire du chevalier Des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, the seventh, final volume of his Memoires et aventures d'un homme de qualité qui s'est retiré du monde (1731), also begins with a voyage to a new country. When we first see Manon she is in chains, a prisoner shackled to prostitutes, and bound for exile to America. Yet a “man of quality,” the Marquis de Renoncour, takes pity on this belle fille and, despite her condition, imagines that she seems a person of high birth. Soon, Renoncour meets her lover, Renato Des Grieux, to whom he lends money.