12/03/16 – MET OPERA BEGINS! – Manon Lescaut – 1pm

Metropolitan Opera

Manon Lescaut
Giacomo Puccini

Anna Netrebko and Kristine Opolais share the title role, a heroine as alluring and irresistible as her adored city of Paris. Marcelo Álvarez is her obsessed lover in the opera that made Puccini famous, showcased in Richard Eyre’s heated,1940s film noir–inspired production, with Marco Armiliato on the podium.

World premiere: Teatro Regio, Turin, 1893. Met premiere: January 18, 1907. Few operas have surpassed Manon Lescaut in the depiction of the urgency of young love. The French tale of a beautiful young woman destroyed by her conflicting needs for love and luxury had already inspired Massenet’s Manon (1884), a relatively new and immensely popular work at the time of Manon Lescaut’s premiere. Puccini made the story his own and infused it with a new level of frank emotion and a flood of melody. The opera was his first great success, leading George Bernard Shaw to name him “the successor to Verdi.”