Sensitive Expression

On Saturday 5 March 2016, the Metropolitan Opera presented Puccini's Manon Lescaut live in HD in both the opera house in New York and movie theaters in seventy countries. I saw the encore on the following Wednesday at the Deer Valley AMC Cinema in Phoenix, Arizona. Basing his third opera on Abbé Antoine François Prévost's novel L'Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, Puccini put together material from five librettists: Ruggero Leoncavallo, Marco Praga, Giuseppe Giacosa, Domenico Oliva and Luigi Illica. Illica and Giacosa completed the final version of the text and later wrote the libretti for Puccini's best-known works: La bohème, Tosca, and Madama Butterfly...