Puccini's Manon Lescaut at SFO

Notes re: SFO Opera production of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut: An introducer said that Manon is a femme fatale, like Carmen or Lulu. She isn’t. She’s a loser, like Monica Lewinsky or Tanya Harding. Like Monica, she doesn’t seem to realize why she is famous. Like Tanya, if she were an ice skater, her brother would kneecap her opponent with a pipe wrench. Together, Manon and her lover are candidates for one of those “World’s Dumbest Criminal” awards. (Editor’s query—did Manon ever live in Portland?)

In opera, this in itself is not enough to destroy the story. Jules Massenet, in his own Manon, just a few years before, seemed able to reckon with all the delicate ironies of the situation. The trouble is that Puccini himself doesn’t seem to get it. This is a problem I often have with Puccini: not just that he is clumsy, mawkish, juvenile, over the top—most opera is clumsy, mawkish, juvenile, over the top-- but that he seems to believe his own claptrap. Unencumbered by much knowledge, I suspect this may have to do with his role as the anointed heir to Verdi. Somebody had to be Queen of the May—the opera establishment couldn’t let the franchise just dissipate—and so when Puccini found the finger pointed at him, his response was understandable enough: who—me! Oh—swell!

Do I betray a certain reserve about Puccini in general? Guilty, your honor, I am not an enthusiast. I do like Gianni Schicchi, particularly the Glyndebourne Festival performance on in Opus Arte DVD. I can still watch the old tape version of the second act of Tosca, with Maria Callas and Tito Gobbi. Maybe someday I will learn to like Turandot, but it’s still above my pay grade. The rest of it--the stuff that everybody loves--I confess I pretty much don't get.

All this is an unlikely lead-in to reporting that I really enjoyed the SFO performance of Manon Lescaut at its opening yesterday. We’d been wanting to see Karita Mattila live ever since we caught her last year on TV doing the “Merry Widow Waltz” with Thomas Hampson in the Met’s Volpe Farewell (still haven’t seen the legendary nude pictures, though). She might be a bit, shall we say, mature for Manon—these days she does stuff like Elsa in Lohengrin—but in a role so incoherent it really didn’t matter. What made it all work was the chemistry with her co-star, Misha Didyk. We’ve been to too may operas where the hero just didn’t seem to notice that the heroine was on stage (yes, Juan Diego Florez, I’m talking about you). But these two did everything but arm-wrestle. Eric Halfvarson played her sugar daddy for comedy, and nicely too (hey, works for Rossini). Together with John Hancock as Manon’s pimp/enabler/agent/brother, they stitched together a strong second act (note to self, are Second Acts Puccini’s specialty?).

I suspect that part of the charm here is that Puccini has not yet learned to hit us over the head with all the hand-wringing and heart-wringing that became his trademark later in life. “I like Puccini best,” says Ms. Buce, “when he is not being Puccini.” Exactly so. As they say, he no Andrew Lloyd Weber, but then, neither is Andrew Lloyd Weber.