Manon

Massenet's Manon opens with a young woman arriving in Paris on her way to a convent, and ends years later in a desert outside New Orleans with the same woman dying in the arms of the man she kept leaving and coming back to. In between, she is charming, impulsive, and self-aware enough to know exactly what she is doing and unable to stop doing it. The young seminarian Des Grieux loves her completely — a fact she uses well and badly in roughly equal measure. Massenet's score is one of the great achievements of French Romantic opera: melodically extravagant, emotionally precise, and capable of making every wrong turn feel not just inevitable but somehow right. This is a long opera, nearly four hours with intermissions, and it earns every minute.