Puccini wrote Manon Lescaut between 1889 and 1892.
Neither of his previous operas ( Le Villi which has some charming music but includes spoken narration and rather a lot of hectic dancing, and Edgar with its huge canvas, huge chorus and undeveloped principal characters ) had had any real success.
Manon Lescaut, on the other hand, was a triumph. Its first performance ended with thirty curtain calls, hard-boiled critics confessed they’d wept and at the celebratory supper afterwards, Puccini was so overcome that he forgot all about the notes he’d written on his shirt cuff for his speech and could only stammer a few words.
What had happened? Two things, basically. The first is that for the first time it was he who decided on the subject of the opera.
His publisher, Giulio Ricordi, had already commissioned a libretto for a Russian subject but Puccini put his foot down. It wasn’t suitable for him. He’d been reading the 18th century French novel The Story of the CHevalier Des Grieux and Manon Lescaut and decided that here was his next opera. There was a snag. Massenet had written his opera Manon just a few years earlier, but Puccini brushed this aside. ” Manon is a heroine I really believe in, ” he wrote to Ricordi.
” She’s a woman who cannot fail to win the hearts of the public. I don’t see why there can’t be two operas about her. A woman like Manon can have more than one lover. ”
The second thing was the libretto. Puccini had accepted his first two libretti without demur but from now on he was much more demanding, engagingly so at times. His first idea, in fact, was to write it himself. Then two librettists were found and sacked.
In the end, at least five people contributed to it and since there were so many of them, they decided to put no names on it.
And with the right libretto, the composer was on song.
But to our tale. In act I, the beautiful ingenue Manon arrives in Amiens where she is to enter a nunnery. She’s accompanied by her double-dealing brother, Lescaut. Two men are smitten by her – the rich old lech Geronte who is planning to abduct her and the student Des Grieux who has fallen in love with her. She leaves for Paris with Des Grieux.
Act II, however, finds her in Geronte’s house, having her hair done for a party and regretting choosing money over love.
Guests arrive and a madrigal is sung. Manon tells her brother she’s bored and he goes to look for Des Grieux.
There follows a dancing lesson and then the guests leave with Geronte.
Des Grieux arrives and Manon persuades him that she still loves him.
As they prepare to leave, Geronte returns briefly and departs with a menacing, ” A presto! ” Manon delays while she gathers jewels together. Geronte has reported her to the police and when she’s arrested, he laughs.
Offstage and during an intermezzo, Manon is convicted of being an immoral woman and a thief, imprisoned and taken to Le Havre from where she is to be deported to America.
Act III is set in the docks in Le Havre at night. Lescaut tells Des Grieux he has bribed a soldier to help Manon escape and he and Des Grieux go looking for her.
The lovers have a brief, anguished conversation through a window.
Officers are heard approaching. Lescaut appears and warns Des Grieux that the game is up.
Townspeople begin to crowd and stage. The sergeant calls out the names of the women to be deported, Manon amongst them, and they go on board while the chorus comments. Des Grieux begs the ship’s captain to take him too.
Act IV finds Des Grieux and Manon in a desolate place ( Louisiana according to the libretto ). Both are spent but Manon is dying. While he looks for water for her, she sings of her regrets.
When he returns, she tells him how much she loves him and dies.
He slumps over her body.
Category: Tuscany Charming
Tuscany, Ugolino – a Gruesome Tale
In Lucca it’s a common joke that the mountains between Lucca and pisa keep the people from having to see each other. A tunnel now leads to the Pisa side but the ideological separation is still felt by football fans, graffiti artists and ordinary citizens. In Lucca e read Dante’s story about Count Ugolino della Gherardesca as the potrait of a power-hungry Pisan at his worst. Dante froze Ugolino within the deepest circle of Inferno because he betrayed his homeland and his political party.
In Italy, where peope identify with their hometown very strongly, this story’s theme is not at all archaic.
According to popular legend, Ugolino cannibalized his children.
Archbishop Ruggieri locked the father and sons in the Torre della Muda ( forever after known as Famine Tower ), leaving them to starve to death.
Part of the tower still stands on the northen side of Piazza dei Cavalieri. This is one of Pisa’s most beautiful piazzas and site of Pisa University’s Scuola Normale, where the brightest students are admitted to study.
A corner of the original tower is within Palazzo dell’ Orologio and a plaque on the wall refers to Ugolino. However, scientific literalism demolished the legend in 2002.
A Pisan paleoanthropologist excavated Ugolino’s body and examined some DNA from his ribs which showed he had not eaten meat ( let alone human flesh ) before dying. However, ” truth ” should never get in the way of a good story from history…
Ugolino belonged to an important Ghibelline family. The Ghibellines supported Papal authority, unlike the Guelph city-states Florence and Genoa which favored more local control.
Ugolino was both Podestà ( supreme civil authority ) and Ghibelline leader. During Pisa’s battles with Genoa and other Guelph states, Ugolino aligned with Giovanni Visconti, a Guelph.
The alliance was discovered, Ugolino imprisoned and Visconti exiled.
With the help of Florence and Lucca, however, Ugolino escaped and become a Guelph, again betraying the Ghibellines! In 1284, he returned as head of a Pisan fleet. He again betrayed his countrymen when they were at war with Genoa, feigning surrender and causing their defeat.
When Ugolino returned to power, he gave away Pisan castles to Lucca and Florence as a political expedient. Ghibelline fortunes improved, and Ugolino, then a Guelph, allied with the Ghibelline Archbishop Ruggieri degli Ubaldini. Ugolino exiled his Guelph grandson in 1288 and consolidated his relationship with Ruggieri. Soon Ruggieri betrayed Ugolino by inciting the public against him and then ordering the imprisonment of Ugolino, his two sons and two grandsons.
Finally the Archbishop threw away the key and left him and his children to starve to death.
In Canto XXXIII, Dante has Ugolino gnawing on the Archbishop’s head for all eternity. ” You are to know I was Count Ugolino, and this one here, Archbidshop Ruggieri; and now I’ll tell you why I am his neighbor.” For Dante, the concept of neighbor becomes an unholy alliance in the depth of Inferno!
With ambiguous words, Dante ha Ugolino say, ” After they were dead, I called them for two days; then fasting had more force than grief.”
This line may be interpreted in two ways: either Ugolino devoured his offspring’s corpses after being driven mad with hunger, or starvation killed him before he died of grief.
The more ghastly interpretation is more popular and Ugolino was sometimes known as the ” Cannibal Count “. The corpses were buried in Pisa at in the Church of San Francesco.
For Dante, however, eating one’s children may have served an anagogical ( religiously – significant ) purpose.
All the happenings in the Inferno are reverse-images of happenings in Paradiso. The Eucharist ( celebration of the Mass ) thus becomes a horrific reverse Eucharist in the Ugolino scene.
Soon we will visit also Dante’s Paradiso to present a more positive character – Matilde the Church-Builder, Contessa of Tuscany, famous in Lucca for having built the Ponte della Maddalena ( also know as the Devil’s Bridge ) during the Middle Ages.
Tuscany, The year of the Olive
Olives, those beautiful silvery trees, have today become a visual metaphor for Italy.
Nevertheless, seldom does anyone come to Italy solely for the purpose of growing olives and making olive oil. Most foreign-born cultivators naively back into it somehow. Olives usually enter their lives on a ” bit of land ” just beyond the garden of their dream home, whether it be a humble farmhouse or a full-blown villa.
Those gnarled trunks look so expressively romantic.
The delicate leaves gently sea basking in the Mediterranean sun. The terraced groves are so suggestive of a living link across time to departed generations. Yes… but, wander into any local bar and take a look around at the old tuskers playing cards or arguing over this year’s olive crop and you’ll notice they’ve grown as gnarled as their trees.
Olive farming is indeed lovely work with long hours spent in solitary meditation, but it is also year-round hard work.
The year starts in Februarywith the cutting down of the undergrowth in the olive grove and fertilizing each tree. March and April are pruning time and burning of the cuttings. In May the trees go into bloom, dropping their tiny white flowers on the ground like a summer snow. June the undergrowth is cut again to prevent fire in the olive grove.
July and August is quit time while the olives are left to grow in the hot, dry summer. In late September, some additional light pruning and cutting undergorwth is again on the agenda.
October brings the laying of the nets. November, December and beyond is harvest time and taking the olives to the frantoio to make olive oil and January is clean up time – taking up and putting away the nets and equipment and, of course, enjoying the fruit of our labor!
Tuscany, The Soul of an Actor at Dynamo Camp
It was September 27, 2008, 1:44 pm. At the Dynamo Camp, the thatre was full up for the open-day party. Enzo Manes, Chairman of the Dynamo Foundation, was about to conclude his presentation to the attentive gathering when he said, ” I had prepared a different speech for this occasion. I wanted to thank the wonderful man who gave us the idea of setting up this camp but this morning at 7:30 I received a mail from the States saying that that man is no longer among us,” There was no need to spell out the name and surname of the person he was referring to – we all understood he was talking of Paul Newman.
The emotion stirred all the assembled guests who spontaneously stood and applauded.
Dynamo Camp is a totally free summer camp, located in the hilss of Pistoia, an hour’s drive grom Lucca and 25 min. from Florence. It is open to children aged between 7 and 16, who live in Italy and are affected by serious and chronic pathologies, currently undergoing treatment or in post-hospitalization convalescence. Here they spend 7-10 days, without their parents, lovingly looked after by specialized doctors, qualified health personnel and volunteers, whose main concern is to let the children experience a special holiday in the countryside, mixing with children with similar illnesses.
There are plans to open the camp to children coming from other European countries as well.
The idea of creating this sort of camp, called ” A Hole in the Wall “, came to Paul in 1998 and he started one just next to his house in Connecticut.
He eventually opened twenty of these camps around the world in which he invested all the million dollars gained from his food business. This one, located in the middle of Tuscany, inside a 20-hectare WWF oasis, is the only one in Italy.
When the children arrive at the camp, after long periods of boredom and surrering in hospital, they’ re quite indifferent to the beautiful place.
But within a day or two, they discard their hospital clothes in favour of Sioux costumes and get involved in the activities that have been carefully planned for them. The goal of the camp is to give them a week of fun and laughter, so once their morning treatments are over, they have a full day of games ahead. They recover energy and sef-confidence, they smile again and they want to try everything, from performing on stage, to climbing and playing Indians in a camp.
The friendly arms of the volunteers allow them to quit their wheelchairs and even ride on a horse.
Feeling safe in their protective embrace, they forget their hardships and squeals of excitement testify to their enjoyment, later reported in the daily diary they keep.
Money is the ” mother’s milk ” of any voluntary association. So we can be mothers to any of these camps but also contribute in many other different ways.
This year 230 children have been hosted in Dynamo Camp and 7 million euros were raised. The foundation’s goal for 2009 goal is to host 400 children.
Paul Newman visited the camp in May 2006 and said, ” It’s a magic place. ” He too was a magic person, not just for his aura of charm and seduction but also for the beauty of his soul. Thank you, Paul, for having started all this.
To find more about Dynamo Camp, www.dynamocamp.org. For horse riding and guided tour inside the WWF oasis, email oasi.ilcestodellupo@kme.com.
Tusscany, The “Modi” Practical Joke of Livorno
My friends, to let you understand and feel the spirit of Livorno and people who lives in this incredible city, I thought about an old, very old story that for sure you cannot miss. Too funny!
This is the story of a huge practical joke involving one of Livorno’s most famous personalities, Amedeo Modigliani, and four ordinary young men, which took place 20 years ago in one of the nicest areas of the city, the Medici canal which flows in front of the indoor market.
The joke took place back in 1984, however to fully understand how it came about we must first go back to 1909 and discover a bit about the events which led up to it. It was in 1909 that Amedeo Modigliani, a young artist and sculptor who had just turned 25 years old, was hugely disappointed by the negative reviews that he had received from critics about his work and as a result decided to leave his hometown forever. His sculptures, which were completed in a figurative style of the beginning of the 20th century, that he had seen in Paris, and which were inspired by African art, were not to the taste of the local art critics and one critic even told the young artist that he would be better off just throwing them all away.
The general story goes that it was these criticisms which forced Modigliani to leave his town, dumping all of his failed works of art in a ditch in the process. His failed work actually consisted of sculptures of human heads, which were harsh and elongated in style and sculpted into the stone in a style for which his work was to become famous following his death. The ditch in which he dumped his sculptures (the name of which indicates the canals of Livorno which cross through the historical centre) would have been Fosso Reale, a ditch of the Medici Canal which goes from Piazza della Reppublica to Piazza Cavour, where you can see one of the city’s most well-known monuments: the 18th century Chiesa degli Olandesi, with its spectacular Neo-Gothic, yellow, stone facade and the impressive General Food Market with its tall, big windows which feature greek style colomns.
Now, in 1984, it is 100 years after the birth of Modigliani and Vera Durbé, the manager of Livorno’s Progressive Museum of Contemporary Art, decides to organise an exhibition of Modigliani’s sculptures, to celebrate his 100th year. Her idea, however, prompted an interesting challenge: The search for the legendary heads since they had been previously thrown into the canal by a young Modi. The quest was supported by the administrative council, who approved the dredging of the works from the ditch.
The excavation work took place in the sunny month of July, under the watchful eyes of many who stood waiting excitedly for any news of the recovery of these long-awaited works of art. Their wait lasted a week and on the eighth day three stone sculptures, scultped in the harsh, elongated style for which Modigliani was by now famous for, were successfully excavated, one after the other. They were presented to the many art critics of Livorno, who claimed that the heads were the original work carved by the hands of Modigliani immediatly after examining them closely.
At first, it seems that the story has a happy ending: Durbé’s dream was realised and art lovers from all over the world flocked to Livorno… but they were forgetting that Livorno is a city famous for its pranks and practical jokes and here it is always possible that things are not always as they seem. Therefore, after a month of much talk and awards regarding the three newly-recovered sculptures, three Livornese students: Pietro Luridana, Pierfrancesco Ferrucci and Michele Guarducci, came forward claiming to have sculpted one of the three heads, in the garden of one of their houses, using drills and other tools bought from a local hardware store. They presented photos of themselves in action and the splinters of stone pertaining to the sculpture in question. Then, on national television they re-enacted the creation of the masterpiece.
Not long after, a sculptor named Angelo Froglia laid claim to the other two heads. Angelo Froglia was, in fact, just an ordinary dockworker who was passionate about art and was a talented sculptor. He claimed that he came up with the idea to pretend to have sculpted these pieces as a way of showing how art critics are led more by market trends rather than their own perceptions and the true worth of each individual piece of work. Both the three students and Froglia achieved their goals as in the end the joke was on the art critics who had previously slammed the work of Modigliani.
Talk of these events lasted a while. Mainly due to the fact that too many acclaimed art critics had already declared the authenticity of the three heads. However, although it was, in fact, the three students and Froglia who had, separately, sculpted the heads which had been excavated from the canal, there were still those who thought that they were liars who had conspired together to pretend to be the true sculptors of the heads, and so continued to believe that the sculptures were the original work of Modigliani. The reality is that only in Livorno could two completely different, unrelated groups of people have come up with exactly the same successful practical joke.