A COURTESAN mingles with the upper classes. She is wooed by the hot-blooded youth of the aristocracy. She becomes an emotional pawn in a social game she can never win. Fate decrees the inevitable. The courtesan dies a tragic and lonely death. True love never stood a chance.
It's a theme that Scottish Opera explored earlier this season in David McVicar's elegantly powerful production of Verdi's La Traviata – an opera reinterpreted by Hollywood, but with a happy ending, in the film Pretty Woman. And it's back this week in
a promisingly opulent new production by French director/choreographer Renaud Doucet of Jules Massenet's extravagant five-act opera, Manon.
The signs are that Massenet's French spectacular will not only recapture the dignified verve of McVicar's Verdi, but close the season on a delirious high with no holds barred when it comes to theatrical thrills and spills.
Consider the vital statistics of this new production. A cast of 60 or more, which includes a flamboyant troupe of Baroque dancers, will work their way through 165 costumes, 85 wigs, 75 hats, six giant bird costumes and an estimated 250 metres of delicate French lace over the course of the three-hour opera, accompanied by a 70-strong orchestra. Traditionalists must be drooling at the prospect.
And in case there are doubters out there who fear the worst of operatic excess, all this promise of spectacle comes with assurances of level-headed integrity. A well-respected directorial team is betting its reputation on that.
In charge of the music is Scottish Opera's new musical director, Francesco Corti, a man who knows his onions when it comes to high Romanticism in French and Italian opera. Just how his musical vision will sit with the multitalented and iron-willed Doucet remains to be seen.
Those familiar with Doucet's operatic track record – particularly in partnership with his designer and close friend André Barbe – will know that the actor and dancer turned stage director and choreographer settles for nothing less than imaginative perfection. Added to which is the inevitable dance element that has become his personal hallmark. "The reason I stopped working as a dancer was that I felt it was not done with emotion. I need to have emotion, and for me that dimension lies in the drama of opera," he says.
Among the French duo's most notable successes since teaming up in 2002 are productions as diverse as Puccini's Turandot and the Viennese premiere of The Sound of Music.
Doucet and Barbe were especially praised by the critics for "taking the kitsch out of The Sound of Music", an achievement probably facilitated by the fact it was sung by the Vienna Volkoper cast in German.
Indeed, in honouring the emotional core of a plot, Doucet has no time for flippancy. He believes that Manon – the heroine of Abbé Prevost's 18th-century novel Manon Lescaut, whose tragic story has been turned into operas by Puccini, Auber and Massenet – deals with really serious issues, although opulence plays a role in the drama, not least in Massenet's emotionally superior version.
"The key to the opera is that Manon is not part of the high society she is moving in, just as with Violetta in La Traviata", he argues. "Des Grieux, whose father refuses to allow them to marry, can never be with Manon. Her motive then is simply to survive. Fear and survival are central to this opera. People who make a link between Manon and manipulation are wrong."
To interpret the role, Doucet has called upon a soprano he knows and trusts, Anne Sophie Duprels, who starred in his 2006 production of Berlioz's epic Benvenuto Cellini for L'Opéra National du Rhin. "We enjoy working together," he says. And in the tenor Paul Charles Clarke, he believes he has a "very honest and very interesting" Des Grieux.
There has been talk of this Scottish Opera production being "traditional". This elicits an indignant hiss from Doucet: "It is traditional in the sense that it is in period costume. I am not against traditional, but I am against conservative."
• Scottish Opera's new production of Massenet's Manon opens tonight at the Theatre Royal Glasgow. More information at: www.scottishopera.org.uk
