Of all Jules Massenet’s operas, Manon was certainly the most successful – it premiered at the Opéra-Comique in 1884 to mixed critical reviews, but an enthusiastic public and a generous profit. The work was revived in 1891 and became a popular standard of the theatre’s repertoire, second in the public’s affections only to Bizet’s Carmen. While the simple beauty and song-like phrasing of Massenet’s music accounts for much of the opera’s immediate and continuing popularity, the allure of his heroine plays a large role as well.

Manon has proved to be a particularly captivating woman. Antoine-François Prévost’s novel L’histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731) inspired four works: a ballet by Halevy (1830) and operas by Auber (1856), Massenet, and Puccini (1893). Composers and Parisian audiences were as smitten with Manon as her suitors in Prévost’s tale. For Massenet, however, a much broader fascination with the Parisian coquette (and women in general) drew him to Prévost’s story. Massenet was always preoccupied with his prima donnas, personally and professionally, and he took an active role in the selection of the first Manon. He seized upon his first choice because of her resemblance to a young flower girl on the Boulevard des Capucines, but the singer was already engaged at the Nouveautés, so he returned to the star of his first opera, Le Grand’ Tante: Marie Heilbronn. When Heilbronn died in 1886 Massenet claimed that he “should prefer to stop performances rather than have the part sung by another.” However, he found solace in the revival of the role by Sybil Sanderson, whom he later called the “ideal Manon.”

His memoirs also include effusive praise for all the women he could remember having performed the role and apologies for those he could not. Moreover, his consideration was not reserved for singers alone. Massenet was sentimental about most of the women he knew; the score of Manon is dedicated to the wife of theatre director Léon Carvalho because she sighed when she first heard the music, and wished herself twenty years younger so that she might sing it. Over his career Massenet brought to life a list of memorable heroines as extensive as Puccini’s, but Manon remains the most enchanting. Massenet was indeed, as his student Xavier Leroux called him, a “musician de la femme.”

Manon also served as a mirror in which the French operatic audience could see its own musical past, present, and future. In an obvious reference to France’s long operatic tradition, the Act II tableau features a pastiche of eighteenth-century dance styles that accompany the appearance of a ballet troupe, part of an extravagant gesture by Manon’s richest and oldest suitor, Guillot de Morfontaine. Ballet sequences were one of the most typical features of French opera from the time of Louis XIV, and the martial dotted-note figures of the French opera overture (from the older tragedies en musique) heralds the appearance of a ballet in Manon.

In addition to referencing France’s musical history, Manon also displays many of the standard traits of French opera at the time. Like many operatic composers of the nineteenth century, Massenet referred to earlier musical styles for scenes in churches or with religious overtones. In the third act, the change in setting from the Cours de la Reine in scene one to the church of Saint-Sulpice in scene two is accompanied by antiquarian sounds of the organ and choral singing. Including a scene in a church was also typical of the opéra comique genre; certain scenes were expected, including a church scene (Act III, scene 2), a street scene (Act I, scene 1 and Act III, scene 1), and a gambling scene (Act IV, scene 1). Manon also includes brief passages of dialogue and instrumentally accompanied melodrama, both characteristics of opéra comique.

In many ways, Manon is representative of French opera up until the mid-nineteenth century, but Massenet also departs from contemporary operatic norms in this work. While he does include the expected stock scenes and styles of text delivery characteristic of an opéra comique, the transitions between dialogue, melodrama, recitative, and arioso are more fluid than in other operas of the time. Massenet was fascinated with the blend between speech and song and went on to experiment with blurring the boundary between the two in his Expressions lyriques (1913). With Manon, Massenet also challenges expectations by blending elements of the different dramatic genres being produced in Paris at the time, each of which was associated with a particular theatre: opéra comique, opéra lyrique, and grand opéra. Unlike most previous opéra comique, it does not have a happy ending – the death of the main character on stage, pioneered most spectacularly in Carmen, was still unexpected at for the genre and more appropriate to an opéra lyrique, which often had more tragic or romanticized plots. In addition, the scale of the crowd scene on the Cours de la Reine, the use of tableaux, and the sheer length of the score are reminiscent of grand opera.

The most forward looking aspect of Manon, however, is the use of recurring motives for certain characters and relationships, the most prominent of which first appears as a violin solo and represents the lovers, the Chevalier des Grieux and Manon. Although these motives function differently from Wagnerian leitmotif, Massenet was fascinated by Wagner and performances of his operas were becoming more common in Paris. After a performance of Parsifal in 1886, an observer heard a stunned Massenet declare that he would burn the score to his next opera, Werther, upon his return home. Massenet’s playing at leitmotif came at the beginning of a rising Wagnerian influence in French opera which culminated in works like Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1895).

Both because of Massenet’s musical ingenuity and the appeal of his heroine, Manon remains a vital standard of the operatic repertoire. At over a century old, she is still as alluring as ever.