Manon Lescaut: Puccini’s Anna Nicole?

This season has already seen Manon Lescaut appear in several different operatic guises across the UK, but it was Covent Garden’s new production of Puccini’s version (its first staging of it in three decades) that was the hottest ticket of all. The Latvian soprano Kristine Opolais and the superstar tenor Jonas Kaufmann were tackling the roles of the lovers, Manon and Des Grieux, for the first time. Antonio Pappano, in the repertoire where he most reliably excels, was in the pit.

In an introductory talk before the production opened, the conductor tentatively drew a comparison between Puccini’s first major success and Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Anna Nicole, which opens the Royal Opera’s next season. He has a point, of course, not least because Manon — especially in Puccini’s work — is a heroine who can be seen, depending on one’s point of view, as either exploiter or exploited, a victim of others or of herself. Puccini relished these contradictions, but what his score should also do is elevate Manon, placing her tragedy on a level where the moral balance sheet is swept away as we’re swept along — the composer himself proclaimed that while Massenet, whose earlier Manon he knew, ‘will feel it as a Frenchman, with powder and minuets … I will feel it as an Italian, with desperate passion.’

Pappano certainly feels the piece as an Italian, with conducting of marvellous lyrical flexibility and fierce conviction; the account of the Intermezzo was magnificent. But Jonathan Kent’s new modern-dress production (with grim designs by Paul Brown) might in part be what suggested the Anna Nicole parallel: there’s little more than a boob job to separate the real-life Playboy model from Opolais’s Manon here after she’s abandoned Des Grieux and become a Barbie doll for old, rich Geronte.