Manon Lescaut

What's different

The original, with the first act's own finale, the first setting of Manon's fourth-act aria and the final duet uncut. Nobody was credited on the title page of the score, the authorship having passed through so many hands: Marco Praga, Domenico Oliva, Ruggero Leoncavallo, Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa all worked on it, and so did the publisher Giulio Ricordi and Puccini himself. Illica and Giacosa finished it, and went on to write the next three operas together. The sources still differ at the edges of that list: Osborne omits Puccini, and the Centro Studi omits Giacosa.

What's different

Puccini replaced the first act's finale for this revival, ten months after the premiere, and it is the new music that makes this a version rather than a retouching. Puccini was present when the same text was given at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples on 21 January 1894.

What's different

The last text Puccini approved, and the one performed today, which is why it is primary. Manon's fourth-act aria returns here to a rewritten poem, having been dropped almost entirely from the opera for twenty years: Puccini sanctioned that cut through the first decade of the century, and the critical edition treats the shortened text as a stage in its own right although no premiere is recorded for it. Further small corrections followed at the Teatro del Giglio in Lucca on 15 September 1923.