An Abysmal Weekend

Bored and unmotivated, with time to kill, there’s simply nothing left to do here, so we’re looking down at the dry bottom of the empty barrel.  Maybe time for Manon Lescaut, Puccini, 1893?

No, no; I already played solitaire.  I already saw the first 6 minutes of the “PBS Weekend” news report.  Washed up the dishes for tomorrow.  No scotch or bourbon in the house.  I’m telling you, there really is no other option.

Moving downward though the Puccini deck, I’ve seen Turandot (OK, I guess), Butterfly (unspeakably sad), and Tosca (charged with horror throughout). 

Trying one more time, because this guy wrote a lot of popular operas, and I wouldn’t want to rashly shovel them all aside with the Strauss heap, just because I couldn’t quickly guess the mystery ingredient.

Puccini: Musician or Piano Hack?

Watching this sort of stuff again.  Jesus.  What a project.  The challenge is, trying to figure out what Puccini is offering here, as a replacement for the lively, engaging, musical bel canto era of opera, which had recently ended.

I think what is going on is:

1.    He’s giving you helpful background mood music, that matches the tone of each part of the scene. 

2.    Then he gives the singers little musical phrases so they can sing their lines instead of saying them.

No optimistic choruses, no rousing drinking songs, hardly any heartfelt arias or complex duets.  Mostly, they just say what they have to say.  Each line intoned with a brief melody, unrelated to anything else.  

(Question: How do the singers memorize all this?  Nothing is there to sew all the scraps into a continuous piece of music, plus it’s in Italian.)

Idle Chit-Chat on Stage

Puccini likes lots of conversations – quick back and forth between two or three people, everyone with a short statement or response.  It’s not poetic, and it’s startling when Manon or her brother of any of her lovers comes up with a little metaphor, or even an emotional restatement of his or her lines.

The history is that he shuffled through five different librettists, trying to get the writing done just so.  But this was wasted energy, is my take on it.  The librettists appear to have just scrawled laborious prose for a stage play, with few exceptions. 

Here’s the train from Arras.

They are getting off.  Look!

Such elegant passengers.

Manager!

Here I am.

I’ll stay here tonight.

Please see to my luggage.

What a lovely woman.

Please follow me.

Snooze.  It took a team of five to come up with that?  Where’s my guy Bellini with a couple of energetic soldiers waving swords in the air and shouting up their courage to die heroically?   Huh? 

Let’s rouse the audience here, by looking at the next few minutes of the “PBS Weekend” news.

So OK, they are performing a play, and it is easy to imagine how it would all go down if they ONLY used the background music to convey the mood.  It would go down just fine, and probably more concisely, with no loss.  No worse than the first 15 minutes of Puccini’s La Boheme, which, as we well know, is all I could stomach.

This Story Line is so OVER

So he pulls off this simplistic story – granted, it’s drawn from the 150-year-old Manon tale by a Jesuit priest named Prévost.  150 years old when Puccini (and Massenet) wrestled it onto the stage.  Now pushing 300 for us listeners.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  The woman is naïve enough to bail on her devoted young handsome guy Renato, to go instead with the huge house, glittery jewelry, servants and in-house dancers and musicians.  All this comes with an old fart, to whom she has to say “I love you” every day or so.

·       Monte, Monte!  I’ll take door #2, the aging creep!  Correct!  I’m not very smart, Monte!

·       But Manon, Roberto Alagna is playing your young handsome guy.  Are you SURE?  Also, I have door #3, which…

·       Oh, no, I’m good, Monte -- the wrinkly sedentary rich guy!  Sure, Renato des Grieux is my age, but he’s poor!  And I cannot pronounce his last name.

·       Manon, are you OK in the head?

See, with Massenet’s version, Manon is fresh and energetic, looking for new places and new adventures.  Yes, she does get confused when offered the choice between a high lifestyle vs. deep human love, but she seems peppier and more ready to get out there and live, in the Massenet.  Plus, that role is sung by Lisette Oropesa, so, good enough!

Massenet’s Manon was in the can 9 years earlier, and successful, so the publisher told Puccini to move on, but no.  Further, a Frenchman named Auber had taken a crack at Manon 28 years before that.  Guys, guys, cool down – it’s not that clever a yarn.  Unless you add in some soldiers with helmets and swords.

Incidentally, in the Met’s 2016 Lescaut, in Act 2, we see (and hear) some small part of the set crash to the floor right behind Manon, while she is trying to get Roberto to remove her clothing.  Prop malfunction -- better than the plot itself!

Death of a Fool

For the final act, Manon ends up sick in a place labeled “A Wasteland” (maybe Indiana), dying slowly, and the audience guesses that Puccini was trying to top Verdi in the “most beautiful death scene” competition.  This one is great – the background music is loud and slow and sad!   And she dies for about 15 minutes, with Roberto/Renato in tears.

But not as good as Violetta going out at the end of Traviata, partly because we don’t fully sympathize with her, as we did with the poor consumptive Violetta. 

Manon just wasn’t that bright in this story, and insufficiently decisive.  Should I hurry out the door and escape the cops, to save myself and Roberto Alagna?  Or stop and grab a lot of the old geezer’s cash and sparkly necklaces to take with me?  Dumb bunny.  Off to the Wasteland with you!

One is reminded of the equally foolish woman in Act 1 Scene 1 of Boheme – the young dudes trick her into staying and chatting with them -- by hiding her keys.  Come on, Pooch guy – what kind of women were you running with, back there in Tuscany?  All airheads?

Any Hope for Giacomo P?

I don’t know for sure; that was pretty hard work.  I feel like I’m missing out on something good, hidden in Rondine, Fanciulla, Il Trittico possibly even La Boheme, but Lescaut here doesn’t convince me that I’m any closer to the big payoff from Puccini.

The idea here was to check out the earliest-written GP opera I could find, maybe to catch a fading ray of the end of the Romantic Period.  (Same as the priority to find Wagner’s early Rienzi.)  But there isn’t any Le Villi (1883) or Edgar (’89) with English titling, so I did my best.  No joy.

Too bad, also because our guy Strauss started churning out quite a list about the same time, with the same weird results.  If only I could figure out why these things are popular.

So, enough with the Pooch for this week; I need a break.  Got a lot of Rossini, Donizetti, Smetana, and even Meyerbeer, Spontini, Cimarosa, and the Ricci brothers to catch up on.  Fun guys – less work, more popcorn and beer.