Manon in the Desert, Wagner on the Beach

Abstract

The fourth act of Manon Lescaut takes place, notoriously, in a desert “on the borders of New Orleans.” Previously, in Paris, Manon had been arrested as a common prostitute and exiled to the New World. Now she is in flight again. As the curtain opens, she and her lover Des Grieux are half-dead—starving and exhausted; midway through the act he goes off in futile search of shelter. While Des Grieux hesitates, and then leaves the stage, we hear an extended orchestral passage that culminates in the citation of a theme that has represented the characters' love for much of the opera. At the end of the third act it was sounded triumphantly, triple forte, by the full orchestra. Now it is luminous but also distant, like a memory. Moments of purely instrumental writing such as this, coupled with a canny use of leitmotifs, have often earned Puccini's opera the epithet “Wagnerian.” The passage also brings to mind, and quite clearly, Verdi's ironic treatment of the “bacio” theme in the last act of Otello. But in the next measures Puccini leads the listener into a rather different sound world (ex. 1). The love theme is cut off with five blunt chords: B-flat minor, F minor, B-flat minor, F minor, B-flat minor. The tempo then relaxes, these same harmonies are slowed down from quarter notes to half notes, and they alternate unceasingly for the first thirty-seven bars of Manon's aria “Sola, perduta, abbandonata.” After a contrasting passage of exactly equal length, the two chords return, oscillating again until the aria's close.1 “One of the most original pages of the score,” according to Julian Budden, this static aria has no obvious precedent in the Italian repertoire.2 If the lyrical love theme looks back to the traditions of the nineteenth century, Manon's ostinato heralds the twentieth.