Tic-tac or ‘Manon Lescaut mi chiamo’: Puccini and the dramaturgy of time

Abstract

This article examines the value of dramatic time in Giacomo Puccini's Manon Lescaut. This opera follows in the footsteps of the narrative and formal manipulations of Angello Zanardini, Amilcare Ponchielli, Arrigo Boito and Giuseppe Verdi. However, Puccini and his librettists normalise this manipulation of temporality to leave behind the structural alternation between static and dynamic sections. Thanks to an elaboration of the orchestral texture and the assimilation of the motif to a temporal value, Puccini succeed in making time an objective and constitutive element of a dramatico-musical fresco. All the more essential in the deserts of New Orleans in Act IV, the ‘motif of the name’ that Puccini was able to define in time, becomes a reference point for the ineluctability of time passing. This definition of time as a tangible dramatic parameter denies the abstraction of the lyrical numbers of the old solita forma and contradicts Mosco Carner's criticism that Puccini's last act is no more than ‘a lament in duet form, lasting as long as eighteen minutes’.