“Let’s make the most of youth, we will not be twenty forever!” Such is the motto of Manon, a sinner without malice, flighty and impulsive, the inspiration of one of Jules Massenet’s greatest operas. Manon is a beautiful young woman whose parents have chosen to send to a convent. Fate, however, has other things in store for her, when she meets the Chevalier Des Grieux, a student from a noble family but of poor means.
The two fall in love and elope to Paris together, where a cruel ending awaits, as Manon, with her taste for luxury, draws Des Grieux into a spiral of moral degradation.

Similarly inspired by Prévost’s novel, Massenet’s Manon premiered at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1884. It was an immediate, overwhelmingly popular success, with the audience repeatedly calling out the singers and composer for encores and curtain calls. Massenet’s orchestral mastery is given full expression in the very different and compelling atmospheres he creates—festivities on the street, the mystical air of the Church of Saint-Sulpice, the squalidness of a gambling house. In the score we find frivolous local eighteenth-century coloratura and brilliant comic streaks, which counterbalance the emotional intensity of the story. Dominating the scene is Manon, whose transformation is conveyed with exquisite subtlety through memorable melodies—from the innocence of “Voyons, Manon plus de chimère,” to the sensuality of “N’est ce plus ma main,” to the hopeless resignation of the finale.