Manon Lescaut
Abbé Prévost · first published 1731
A novel of 1731 that two of the greatest opera composers set within nine years of each other.
16 versions · 1914–2013 · screen, stage
Massenet’s Manon came in 1884, Puccini’s Manon Lescaut in 1893, and both remain in the repertory — an unusual case of the same short novel supporting two rival masterpieces. Massenet returned to it again later, and Hans Werner Henze made a modern version, Boulevard Solitude, in 1952.
The book is a first-person confession, delivered by a man who cannot stop excusing himself, about a girl whose motives he never once understands. The operas give her a voice. The novel deliberately does not, which is the whole of its cruelty.
France, 1731 — and a deportation the author had watched
The transportation of prostitutes and petty criminals to Louisiana was real policy, and Paris could watch the convoys leave. Prévost, a Benedictine who had twice run away from his order, wrote the story as a small part of a much larger memoir, and it was that small part the censors banned and the public wanted.
It was published in the last years of the Regency, when the French court had spent a decade in open, expensive dissipation and the state was ruinously in debt after Louis XIV. A novel about a young man of good family destroying himself over an unfaithful girl, in a Paris where everything and everyone had a price, did not read as an exotic fable.
On screen
10Film and television, earliest first.
- 1914 Manon Lescaut Herbert Hall Winslow
- 1918 Manon Lescaut Mario Gargiulo
- 1926 Manon Lescaut Arthur Robison
- 1927 When a Man Loves Alan Crosland
- 1940 Manon Lescaut Carmine Gallone
- 1950 Manon Henri-Georges Clouzot
- 1955 The Lovers of Manon Lescaut Mario Costa
- 1968 Manon 70 Jean Aurel
- 1986 Manón Román Chalbaud
- 2013 Manon Lescaut Gabriel Aghion
On stage
6Opera, musical theatre and ballet made from it.
- — Manon Lescaut Daniel François Esprit Auber
- — Manon Jules Massenet
- — Manon Lescaut Giacomo Puccini
- — Le portrait de Manon Jules Massenet
- — Boulevard Solitude Hans Werner Henze
- — L'histoire de Manon Jules Massenet
Versions are listed where they are documented. A century of stage productions and most broadcasts were never catalogued at all, so this is what can be shown rather than everything that was ever made.