Manon by Massenet, sön 12 mar 2023, Från (2022/2023), Regisserad av Jiří Nekvasil,, Dirigent Bruno Ferrandis, Jiří Habart, Antonín Dvořák Theatre, Ostrava, Tjeckien

The end of the 19th century represented a search for a balance between old and new perspectives for French opera. It had to react to the expressions of realism appearing in the novels of Gustave Flaubert or Émile Zola or in the paintings of Gustave Courbet, to Wagner's innovations in music-dramatic art and, last but not least, to the French operatic ideal represented by Giacomo Meyerbeer's great French opera. The theme, which inspired both Vítězslav Nezval and Giacomo Puccini, was transformed even earlier by Jules Massenet into a masterpiece of French lyric opera. The music of his most famous opus is sophisticated, and despite the occasional sentimentality, it stands out for its melodic invention, thanks to which the composer plastically depicts the characters of the individual characters. While in the first half of the 19th century, French opera favored male heroes, by the end of it, women were beginning to predominate in the leading roles. Manon is a proof of this tendency . Massenet's feeling for melodic singing was once called a celebration of the soprano.