“She is charming but amoral,” wrote the British choreographer Kenneth MacMillan of his incarnation of the French Old Regime literary character Manon Lescaut, the subject of his 1974 ballet Manon, or, as it is usually known in continental Europe, including at Milan’s La Scala, where it was revived this summer, L’Histoire de Manon.
MacMillan, who was artistic director of the Royal Ballet from 1970 to 1977 and thereafter its principal choreographer until his death in 1992, needed a more engaging subject after the tepid reception of his first three-act ballet Anastasia (1971; an expanded version of a one-act ballet of 1967), which visited the then-unsolved mystery of the royal impostor Anna Anderson, who was still alive at the time and had for decades falsely claimed to be the murdered Russian grand duchess of the ballet’s title.
The morality tale of Manon follows from Abbé Antoine François Prévost’s 1731 novel Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut. Manon, the daughter of an ambitious bourgeois family, is being taken to a convent by her brother. At a rest stop, she encounters the charming Chevalier des Grieux, a noble but poor philosophy student. They immediately fall in love, but Manon also attracts the attention of an older man who hopes to tempt her with money. He eventually succeeds in taking Manon away from des Grieux, leaving the young man in despair until he devises a scheme to improve his finances and win her back. Denounced as criminals—he for cheating at cards and she for prostitution—they are exiled from France, and Manon dies.
With changes and embellishments, the novel accomplished the rare feat of being successfully adapted for two operas that each won a place in the standard repertoire: Jules Massenet’s Manon (1884) and Giacomo Puccini’s Manon Lescaut (1893), among others. By the time MacMillan came to the subject in the 1970s, the tension between love and money had grown beyond the plot’s timeless emotional appeal to capture increasingly sharp material divides in a United Kingdom that had begun to suffer from debilitating economic crises after an already difficult 20th century.
In approaching his subject, MacMillan put much greater emphasis on the role of money, thereby degrading Manon from the sentimentality and innocence that she shows in the respective operas to a mercenary harlotry in which she seems to act only from ambition and instinct. To add to that dimension, MacMillan updated the setting for his ballet from Prévost’s generic Old Regime to the period immediately before the French Revolution of 1789, when France experienced severe economic tensions of its own. As MacMillan said of his approach, he wanted to capture “the precarious division between opulence and degradation.”
If Nicholas Georgiadis’s set and costume designs, still in use around the world and here in Milan, provide opulence in the luxurious idiom of the Louis XVI style, MacMillan’s Manon provides the degradation. She comes off as dreadfully unsympathetic, perhaps as unsympathetic as any balletic heroine. The romance of the operas makes des Grieux’s willingness to ruin himself for her at least somewhat understandable. In both operas, Manon sings a plaintive aria in which she reflects on leaving their modest abode for her wealthier suitor’s grand hôtel particulier. In Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, she recovers her love for the young man prior to a failed escape attempt. Massenet has Manon die before leaving France, remembering her youthful love for des Grieux on the road to the port of Le Havre. Puccini, like Prévost, places her demise in the wilderness outside New Orleans, where she sings an impassioned aria, fearing imminent death, sincerely regretting her poor choices, and hoping she can do something good for the world before she expires.
In MacMillan’s ballet, however, Manon is cynically ruled by money, moving from one lover to the next heedless of the consequences, which include her brother’s murder at the older man’s hand, des Grieux’s murder of a jailer who nearly succeeds in seducing her, and her own death in the Louisiana wasteland, which is shadowed not by love, guilt, or regret, but by a pastiche of memories of her self-indulgent life even as des Grieux sobs over her. The portrayal is so darkly immoral that when the ballet premiered, not even the left-wing British newspaper The Guardian showed any sympathy for MacMillan’s emphasis on money and class issues but tartly concluded that Manon was a “slut” and des Grieux a “fool.” Another critic thought casting Antoinette Sibley, the first ballerina to dance Manon, “an appalling waste” of her talent because the character is so objectionable.
Audiences, however, love the tawdry, and MacMillan scored a huge success. The ballet eventually reached the continent in 1991, where its title had to be changed to L’Histoire de Manon to satisfy Massenet’s heirs, who raised hackles about possible confusion with their ancestor’s opera. Their insistence was not completely out of place, for MacMillan commissioned a score arranged and partially orchestrated by the British composer Leighton Lucas from a pastiche of Massenet’s music, taking material from no fewer than thirteen of his operas, two of his oratorios, and selections from his piano music, art songs, orchestral suites, and other melodies. The version in use here dates from 2011, when the conductor Martin Yates reorchestrated it. The most striking adaptations include sacred music from Massenet’s oratorio La Vierge, which ironically opens and closes the ballet, and his opera Don Quichotte, whose lively introductory music, which depicts a Spanish fiesta, is repurposed for the bustle of New Orleans in the opening of the ballet’s third act.
La Scala’s ballet troupe stands among the best companies in the art form and has lost no luster in this revival of a production it has been showing for thirty years. Nicoletta Manni has been dancing Manon here since 2015 and has returned to the role with the delicacy of an ingenue. Her first steps seemed almost tentative as Manon approaches youthful passion for the first time. She quickly progressed to agile sophistication as the character descends her moral slope to ruin. Reece Clarke stepped in from London’s Royal Ballet for a muscular but sensitive des Grieux. Is he the fool of the ballet’s early critics? Indeed, he is. But his ardor came out in full force and radiated hope and joy until the final moments of abject mourning. Nicola del Freo made artfully slippery moves as the manipulative Lescaut. Villains often have the best lines, or in ballet, the best moves. Gabriele Corrado’s elderly seducer was a nasty piece of work in the role of “Monsieur G. M.” (Guillot de Morfontaine in Massenet’s opera and Geronte in Puccini’s), but his suave steps brought him to the forefront of the performance. Paul Connelly’s masterful conducting was rousing and energetic, revealing both great familiarity (he conducted some of La Scala’s premiere performances when the ballet was first performed here back in 1994) and an assured freshness.
