Tuesday, January 02, 2007

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!

2 Comments:

At January 02, 2007 11:08 PM, Blogger southboulevard said...

You know, recently I read about Antoine de la Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac, the founder of Detroit. Cadillac was eventually sent to be the governor of Louisiana...this is where I am reminded of the prostitutes in New Orleans. I read that the men of New Orleans were started to hook up with the native women because they disliked the whores that kept coming from France. So, Cadillac had wholesome girls sent over from Paris...I miss those days...the days when we could ship people to colonies in order to populate the new land with the offspring of the mother country women...not those natives'!

 
At January 02, 2007 11:13 PM, Blogger Beth said...

Well, I miss the days when noblemen were named after luxury automobile manufacturers.

You and your old-world imported whores. Sheesh!

 

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