Let the music lead

Alex Coolman

John DeMain praised Puccini’s opera “Manon Lescaut” for half an hour

before he got down to mentioning one minor criticism of the work.

“It’s just too hard to sing,” he noted, taking a small sip of coffee.

DeMain, the artistic director for Opera Pacific, was kidding, but only

slightly.

“Manon Lescaut,” coming to the Orange County Performing Arts Center,

really is a difficult work for performers.

The part that Sylvie Valayre sings in the title role is, in DeMain’s

words, “unrelenting.” And many of the lines that tenor Barton Green has

to tackle are high enough and long enough to be a bit of a stretch, as

well.

But DeMain’s affection for the opera, Puccini’s first major success, is

undiminished by the challenges it poses for his performers.

If it’s a rough gem, he said, it’s a gem nonetheless, and it has an

interesting relationship to the more well-known operas -- works like “La

Boheme,” “Tosca,” and “Madama Butterfly” -- that Puccini went on to write

after “Lescaut’s” 1893 debut.

“Every composer has a musical bag of tricks” that recur throughout a body

of work, DeMain said. “This is the opera where he really began to get

that right.”

Take the use of the soft, impressionistic piano chords in the first act

of “Lescaut.” Puccini employs the music to convey the sense of eager

anticipation in the meeting between Manon Lescaut, the heroine, and des

Grieux, her suitor.

But DeMain said Puccini uses almost the same sound in the love duet of

“La Boheme,” a work that was not performed until 1896.

Or consider the use of the major 10th interval. In “Lescaut,” Puccini

introduces the 10th in an incidental manner.

“It’s just used in a way to show some of the whimsy of Manon,” DeMain

Said.

The same interval comes back in a much different way in the marriage

scene in “Madama Butterfly.” In that context, DeMain said, the 10th is

used to convey “a kind of Orientalism.”

The later use of these melodic figures is generally “more refined” than

what happens in “Lescaut,” but it’s in the early work in which Puccini

first shows himself capable of bringing together his formidable

showmanship with a complex musical sensibility.

“This is when the dramatic, emotional writing is coming together,” DeMain

said.

“Lescaut” features an interesting combination of finesse and awkwardness.

When the audience isn’t being wowed by Puccini’s powerful use of

leitmotif, they may find themselves wondering about the odd setting of

the fourth act, which is supposed to take place in “a desert in

Louisiana.”

What desert that might be, Puccini’s notes do not mention.

“There were four librettists working on that piece,” DeMain said. “You

would think that somebody would have known their geography.”

But DeMain said quibbling over minutia will not occupy too much of the

audience’s mental energy.

“The music has to take over. You can’t get your logic buttons

overworking.

“[Verdi’s opera] ‘Il Trovatore’ doesn’t make any sense, either,” he

pointed out.

What Puccini lacks in story line clarity, he tends to make up for in

sheer dramatic force. “Lescaut,” with its tale of turbulent love and

untimely death, is no slouch in this respect.

At times, what DeMain calls the “fabulous death scenes where they say

goodbye for an hour” even come a little close to emotional excess. But

the director said Puccini’s towering peaks and bottomless valleys make

for an entertaining ride.

“I do think the audience’s emotions are manipulated,” DeMain said. “But

that’s why you go.”

WHAT: Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut”

WHERE: The Orange County Performing Art Center, 600 Town Center Drive,

Costa Mesa

WHEN: Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, Feb. 26, at 7:30 p.m., Sunday, Feb.

27, at 2 p.m.

HOW MUCH: $32 to $107

PHONE: (800) 34-OPERA