Adaptations of Manon Lescaut


The French novel Manon Lescaut by Antoine François Prévost has been adapted many times into stage plays, ballets, operas, and films. Manon Lescaut tells a tragic love story about a nobleman and a common woman. Their decision to live together without marrying is the start of a moral decline that also leads to gambling, fraud, theft, murder, and Manon's death as a deported correction girl in New Orleans.
The first adaptation was a theatrical comedy in 1772. Early theatrical and operatic adaptations were not particularly successful, but in the nineteenth century, several major operas were produced. The most renowned adaptations of Manon Lescaut are the operas by Daniel Auber, Jules Massenet, and Giacomo Puccini. Film adaptations followed as soon as the medium was invented, beginning with a 1908 silent film adaptation of Puccini's opera. Early adaptations were period films, set in the eighteenth century; later film adaptations translate the novel's story to a contemporary setting.

Stage adaptations

Theatre

Relatively few of the early theatrical adaptations of Manon Lescaut have survived. There were a few dramas in the eighteenth century and the Romantic period, followed by a larger number in the early twentieth century. The first theatrical adaptation of Manon Lescaut was published in 1772, and first performed in 1782. This was a comedy titled The Virtuous Courtesan, which ends with Manon surviving. It attempted to mix an emotional portrayal of the lovers with some humour, but reviewers found it far inferior to the novel. In 1913, five plays based on Manon Lescaut were scheduled in Paris theatres simultaneously, though the outbreak of World War I prevented them from all being staged.
Although ballets and operas of Manon Lescaut became popular, only three theatrical dramas had even a modest success: The Virtuous Courtesan, Manon Lescaut et le chevalier Desgrieux, and Manon Lescaut. All three include some incidental music, and the 1820 melodrama is also accompanied by a ballet. These adaptations dramatize the narrative in similar ways. Several scenes are consistently included: Manon attending des Grieux's final seminary examination to reunite after his father has separated them; Manon rejecting an Italian prince who seeks her out as a courtesan; and des Grieux desperately burying Manon in Louisiana. In general, theatrical adaptations simplify the plot to one instance of infidelity, a reconciliation, and then the final tragedy, combining Manon's three lovers into just one character. The literary scholar Jean Sgard argues that by reducing the complexity of the narrative, the theatrical adaptations present the lovers as being disproportionately punished for a single mistake, rather than capturing the novel's feeling of a gradual descent into immorality.

Opera

Sgard argues that operatic adaptations came late in the legacy of the novel because the story was incompatible with the eighteenth century's dominant genre of serious opera. The first operatic adaptation in 1836 was not a success. An important change in operatic precedent came after the Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi's popular and influential 1853 opera, La traviata. La traviata is based on the play and novel The Lady of the Camellias by the French writer Alexandre Dumas fils, which are themselves heavily inspired by Manon Lescaut. After 1853, six operas based on Manon Lescaut were written. The most renowned adaptations of Manon Lescaut are the operas by Daniel Auber, Jules Massenet, and Giacomo Puccini.
The operas of Manon Lescaut vary widely in how they adapt the story: the narrative is divided into differing numbers of sections, and adaptations exist in the different operatic genres of comic opera, opera, and lyric drama. One opera has Manon miraculously revive after her death scene in Louisiana; another removes the entire American episode and has her die in France. Operatic adaptations also combine Manon's three lovers into just one character. They forgo the novel's long decline to dramatically juxtapose young love and tragic death. Sgard argues that operatic adaptations are forced to focus on a one-note characterization of Manon, and each opera's evaluation of her moral character is expressed in its depiction of her death.

List of dramas, operas, and ballets

The Virtuous Courtesan, theatrical comedy by César RibiéManon Lescaut et le chevalier Desgrieux, melodrama by Étienne GosseManon Lescaut, ballet-pantomime by Jean-Louis AumerManon Lescaut, melodrama by Pierre-Frédéric-Adolphe Carmouche and Frédéric de CourcyThe Maid of Artois, opera by Irish composer Michael-William BalfeManon Lescaut, ballet by Giovanni CasatiManon Lescaut, drama by Théodore Barrière and Marc FournierManon Lescaut, ballet by Giovanni ColinelliManon Lescaut, opera by French composer Daniel AuberMademoiselle Manon de l'Escaut, a one-act fantasie by Adolphe JolyManon Lescaut, operetta by A. A. LopezManon, opera by French composer Jules MassenetManon Lescaut, or the Castle of Lorme, opera by Richard KleinmichelManon Lescaut, opera by Italian composer Giacomo PucciniHistoire de Manon Lescaut, play by French writer Manon, fille galante, play by French writers Henry Bataille and Albert FlamentManon Lescaut, drama in verse by Czech poet Vítězslav NezvalBoulevard Solitude, opera by German composer Hans Werner HenzeManon, ballet with music by Jules Massenet and choreography by Kenneth MacMillanManon, musical written for the Takarazuka troupe by librettist-director Keiko Ueda and composer Joy Son

Film adaptations

Manon Lescaut was adapted several times after the invention of film. Six silent films were made, of which nearly all are lost due to the degradation of nitrate film. The first was a 1908 adaptation of Puccini's opera, which used a device called a "cinemofono" to synchronize the film with a music recording. It remained in theaters for a month. The only surviving silent film footage is from the 1920s: about a third of a 1926 film by Arthur Robison has been preserved, as well as the entirety of the 1927 Hollywood adaptation When a Man Loves. According to the literary historian Alan J. Singerman, several early films alter the plot to present Manon as an innocent victim who will be more sympathetic to film audiences than an "amoral and guilty" figure motivated by a "love of luxury and pleasure". He says: "unlike readers of the novel, theater and cinema audiences do not have the intervention of a sympathetic narrator like des Grieux to elicit their indulgence toward the dubious behavior of Prévost's Manon."
Early adaptations were period films, set in the eighteenth century; later film adaptations translate the novel's story to a contemporary setting. The 1949 film Manon by Henri-Georges Clouzot depicts des Grieux as a member of the French Resistance and Manon as a Nazi collaborator; he and Manon enter the black market and eventually stow away to Palestine with a group of Jewish refugees. In Manon 70 by Jean Aurel, released in 1968 and set in the near-future of 1970, des Grieux is a globetrotting radio journalist who tags along with Manon's sugar baby lifestyle; instead of ending with Manon's tragic death, this film concludes with both Manon and des Grieux hitchhiking. In a pair of television miniseries directed by Jean-Xavier de Lestrade in 2014 and 2017, Manon is a non-conformist and occasionally violent young woman in a youth detention center who is failed by social systems and lives precariously.

List of films

Manon Lescaut, lost Italian silent film directed by Giovanni PastroneManon Lescaut, lost French silent film directed by A. Calmettes

Works cited

*