What's My Melodic Line?

Take Puccini's Manon Lescaut - please!

Well, it's not my favorite Puccini. A bit overlong perhaps. But I received a DVD of this performance for Christmas. I was reared on the philosophy that you can never have too much opera, so this is a good thing.

Based on a 1731 novel by Antoine François Prévost, the libretto features a young girl shipped off by her father to a convent outside Paris, but her beauty and charm are such that a student absconds with her before she can reach her destination (doubtless the reason she was being institutionalized in the first place). The sweet young thang has very expensive tastes, and the student doesn't have much money, so she leaves him to become mistress to a wealthy old Parisian dirtbag.

I am so sad that the world isn't like that anymore.

Unfortunately, W.O.P.D. has her arrested for prostitution when he catches her with her student lover, so she's exiled to the barren wastes of America. She perishes of thirst and exposure amid the arid, lifeless dunes of southern Louisiana.

The Abbé Prévost didn't know much about geography, but he knew what he liked.

It's hard to empathize with Manon. She's painted as a tragic heroine - innocent and sweet, with the single fatal flaw of a love for luxury; always led astray by worldlier men's attentions to her beauty. But the whole point of tragic heroes is that they're supposed to be, how do you say - ah yes. Heroic! If the tragic flaw (self-absorbed materialism) is the most prominent feature of the character's personality, you don't really have much. Innocent, sweet and pretty is a dime a dozen, really.

I talk a big talk, but of course I was blubbering like a baby at the end. #!%*@ New Orleans desert!