It is worth pressing-on with MANON, Swan-Knight!  Try, if you can, to put the Puccini version of the opera from your mind - Massenet's after something rather different from the story,  and I think he succeeds with it, too   Puccini's heroine is a weak-willed girl who falls into her fate through force of circumstances.  Massenet's Manon is a capricious conniving minx who brings disaster to all in her wake...  quite a different story, in fact   Spoiler Warning - the end is also very different.

By the way, does anyone know the Auber opera MANON LESCAUT?  I didn't realise until recently that there was yet a third opera on this story.  (There was even a fourth composer involved with MANON operas - Leoncavallo rewrote (as a favour to Puccini) the disastrous libretto Puccini had been sent by Praga, cutting reams of off-topic drivel and shaping the in-your-face shocker that Puccini then produced... although Puccini then gave Leoncavallo's version to Illica for beautifying, and Illica gets the libretto-credit usually).

My main intention with those parentheses was to make clear that Leoncavallo had no (known) intention of setting the Manon story himself    However, Leoncavallo effectively acted as the dramaturg on the piece, and a good part of its success was due to his "cinematic" foreshortening of Praga's longwinded libretto

Out of interest, music apart - what do you think of the relative librettos of the two BOHEMES?  I see Puccini backsliding on his verismo principles in the interests of making the "sentimentality" buck?   Leoncavallo's is more stark, I think?  If only his music had been, ehem, a bit better

Ho! Soundwave,

I investigated the Caballé recording in excerpts on iTunes. As I feared, not good...

Yes, I downloaded that aria from Kozena's French Opera album and she's fantastic...better than Fleming on her 'Age of the Diva' disc.

This is quite drastically off-topic, so if we wish to discuss this much further, I suggest we take it onto a new thread.


Leoncavallo's is certainly stark, and much truer to the book.  Leoncavallo set the scenes and characters as they are; Puccini used the core characters from Murger's book but took much of the plot from a single chapter of the book, which is a charming little vignette of a tearjerker which concerns a different set of lovers entirely.  Also from this chapter, Puccini grafts the personality and nature of pathetic little Francine onto Murger's much feistier and less sympathetic Mimi.

Leoncavallo's feels a lot more episodic, like the book, and its biggest weakness is dramatic structure.  The first two acts are a charming and pretty inconsequential romantic comedy, and the last two, a full-on verismo tragedy.  There's absolutely no sense of how the characters get from one to the other.  As for the music, I don't think Leoncavallo's is bad, it's just inconsistent.  However, a friend who has sung in the chorus for it complained of the unusually dense orchestral textures.

Neither composer set Murger's devastating ending faithfully - it wouldn't have made good stage drama - but Leoncavallo comes by far the closest.

Ho Soundwave! I think there is a recording of McCracken and Horne in Le Prophete , although I'm not sure... I always imagine that these operas would need a Thill or Vezzani to do them justice. Not sure who'd come close today - Ben Heppner, or perhaps Roberto Alagna on a good day? 

The CBS recording of Le Prophete features James McCracken, Renata Scotto, Marilyn Horne and Jules Bastin, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Henry Lewis. I picked up a copy on eBay last year and it's an enjoyable piece. I think it would be good to have some new studio recordings of Meyerbeer's operas, especially ones like L'Africaine, Robert le Diable or even Les Huguenots (although there is the Decca recording of the latter available in some places).  Opera Rara are great at recording the unknown Meyerbeer...I just wish they'd turn their attention to some of his greater works.

Anyone know Le Viege?  Thought I might give it a whirl