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The profile · researched 9 October 2026
Massenet's Manon at 142: five acts, one impossible soprano part, and three continents booking it at once
Jules Massenet's 1884 opéra comique has been running almost continuously since its Paris premiere, and the 2026-27 diary is unusually crowded: a seven-performance run in San Francisco from 15 October 2026, a Vienna revival in January 2026, a 100-minute Brooklyn rewrite, and a Metropolitan Opera revival in March 2027 that reaches cinemas on 3 April.
Amiens to Le Havre, by way of 1731
The story arrived nearly 150 years before the music. Abbé Prévost published his novel of the Chevalier des Grieux and Manon Lescaut in 1731; Massenet set a French libretto drawn from it by Henri Meilhac and Philippe Gille, and the result reached the Opéra-Comique in Paris on 19 January 1884. It is an opéra comique in five acts, set in the France of Louis XV, and it moves from a coaching inn at Amiens through a sequence of Parisian rooms — an apartment, a church, a gambling house — to a bare road outside Le Havre.
The spread was immediate and the staying power was unusual. The Opéra-Comique alone reached its 1,000th performance of the piece by 1919, its 1,500th by 1931 and its 2,000th by 1952. Few scores of the period have that kind of record in a single house, and the work has stayed in general circulation rather than surviving as a curiosity revived every few decades.
The part before the piece
What holds the opera together is the title role, and the role is built from a handful of numbers that singers are measured against: Manon's 'Adieu, notre petite table' in the second act, des Grieux's 'En fermant les yeux' alongside it, and his 'Ah! fuyez, douce image' in the third. The soprano is on stage for most of five acts and has to travel from a girl stepping off a coach to a woman dying on a road, which is why Beverly Sills described the part as the French Isolde — a stamina problem dressed up as a charm offensive.
The lineage is long. Sibyl Sanderson was Massenet's own favoured Manon; Nellie Melba and Geraldine Farrar took it on in the decades after, and in the modern era Renée Fleming and Anna Netrebko both made it a calling card. The current generation of interpreters is where the work's present life sits, and the names recur across houses rather than clustering in one.
Paris and Vienna: the stagings that moved it out of the eighteenth century
The two European houses that have carried the piece most recently both relocate it. At the Opéra National de Paris on 5 June 2025, Vincent Huguet's production returned with the action pushed to the 1920s and a set by Aurélie Maestre that treats artworks and sculptures — a Venus de Milo, canvases after Monet, Picasso and Delacroix — as the scenery rather than the decoration. Amina Edris sang Manon opposite Benjamin Bernheim's des Grieux, with Andrzej Filończyk as Lescaut and Pierre Dumoussaud conducting. The reviewer for OperaWire rated the staging an asset and found Bernheim close to turning the evening into a recital.
Vienna State Opera revived Andrei Şerban's 2007 production on 17 January 2026, broadcast live, with Kristina Mkhitaryan and Bernheim under Bertrand de Billy. Peter Pabst's designs push the piece towards French film noir, opening in a 1930s railway station. The Seen and Heard International review called Mkhitaryan's singing resplendent and noted the chemistry in the duets, while being blunt about the score's own problems: an episodic middle, some interminable gambling, and a denouement that arrives too fast for the weight it is asked to carry. That complaint is older than any current staging, and it recurs in almost every serious notice.
Brooklyn, 100 minutes, eight players
The most radical recent treatment came from a company without an orchestra pit. Heartbeat Opera opened Manon! at the Space at Irondale in Brooklyn in early February 2026, condensing all five acts into roughly 100 uninterrupted minutes in English, in an adaptation by Jacob Ashworth and Rory Pelsue, with Pelsue directing and Dan Schlosberg arranging and conducting an eight-piece band of woodwinds, horn, harp, strings, bass and keyboard.
The design worked by subtraction: chandeliers rising and falling with Manon's fortunes, a handful of LEDs and gelled Lekos for the lighting, and costumes assembled on a budget down to buckled shoes bought online. Emma Grimsley sang Manon, Matt Dengler the Chevalier, Glenn Seven Allen the financier Guillot. Reviewers in both Seen and Heard International and TheaterMania treated it as a real reading rather than a reduction — the Seen and Heard notice called it deliberate rather than reductive and found its account of desire shaped by consumer culture uncomfortably contemporary. The run was extended to 15 February 2026.
San Francisco now, New York next
San Francisco Opera opens the piece at the War Memorial Opera House on 15 October 2026, with seven performances running to 1 November — 15, 18, 21, 24, 27 and 30 October, and 1 November, the 18 October and 1 November dates as matinees. Music Director Eun Sun Kim conducts Vincent Boussard's production, which the company co-produced with Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre and the Israeli Opera and last presented in 2017; Boussard designs the costumes himself, with sets by Vincent Lemaire and lighting by Gary Marder that San Francisco Classical Voice singled out in 2017 for its colour washes and oversized shadows. Amina Edris sings Manon opposite her husband Pene Pati as des Grieux, a pairing that goes back to the company's 2019 Roméo et Juliette; Pati was made a Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in May 2026. Vitor Bispo makes his American debut as Lescaut.
The Metropolitan Opera follows in spring 2027 with a revival of Laurent Pelly's 2010 staging — Pelly directing and designing costumes, sets by Chantal Thomas, lighting by Joël Adam. Performances fall on 12, 15, 19, 23, 26 and 30 March and 3 and 8 April 2027, with Nadine Sierra in the title role, Matthew Polenzani as des Grieux, Filończyk again as Lescaut, Carlo Bosi as Guillot, Rod Gilfry as de Brétigny and Jean Teitgen as the Comte, under Yves Abel. The 3 April matinee is the Live in HD cinema transmission, with an encore screening on 7 April.
Why it keeps coming back
Critics have been consistent for decades that the piece is structurally awkward: the title character is centre stage for almost the whole thing, the second half sprawls, and the ending is abrupt. Houses programme it anyway, because a soprano who can carry those five acts turns the awkwardness into the subject — ambition, self-invention and the cost of both, which is also why the Brooklyn adaptation found so little it needed to cut.
The current spread is the clearest evidence of its health. Within eighteen months the work has been staged in Paris, Vienna, Brooklyn and Wellington — Wellington Opera ran it from 1 to 9 August 2026 — and it now sits on the autumn bill in San Francisco and the spring bill at the Met. The role, not the plot, is what is being booked.
The show, now
A full-scale Manon runs long: the Metropolitan Opera's cinema relay of its 2027 revival is billed at roughly four hours and fifteen minutes with intervals, sung in French. There is no support act and no setlist to vary — the evening is the five acts in order, from the inn at Amiens to the road outside Le Havre, with the big set pieces ('Adieu, notre petite table', 'En fermant les yeux', 'Ah! fuyez, douce image') landing in the second and third. The staging on sale in San Francisco from 15 October to 1 November 2026 is Vincent Boussard's co-production with Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre and the Israeli Opera, last seen there in 2017: Boussard's own costumes, Vincent Lemaire's sets, and Gary Marder's lighting, which San Francisco Classical Voice picked out in 2017 for its colour washes and oversized shadows. Eun Sun Kim conducts; Amina Edris and Pene Pati sing the couple, with Vitor Bispo making his American debut as Lescaut, and the performances are in French with English supertitles. The Met's spring run uses Laurent Pelly's 2010 staging with Chantal Thomas's sets, Nadine Sierra and Matthew Polenzani under Yves Abel, screening live in cinemas on 3 April 2027 with an encore on 7 April. Recent notices set the expectation accurately: the Vienna revival in January 2026 drew praise for Kristina Mkhitaryan's singing and the chemistry of the duets while flagging a saggy gambling scene and a rushed ending, and Heartbeat Opera's 100-minute Brooklyn version in February 2026 showed how much of the work survives when the sprawl is cut away.
Researched from sfopera.com · seenandheard-international.com · seenandheard-international.com · theatermania.com · operawire.com · fathomentertainment.com · bachtrack.com · opera-online.com