Manon is the epitome of French opera—passionate and moving but always elegant. It traces the development of a young girl into a courtesan, follows her degradation as she seeks wealth, and chronicles her death in the arms of the only man who loved her.

      Massenet's genius shows itself in a variety of ways as he brings the quintessentially French story to life with music. He uses unexpected effects, such as scoring his dramatic points by ending phrases on a seventh chord, thereby creating a sense of melancholy or the feeling of something unspoken. He creates beautiful melodies that further the drama and capture the natural inflection of French at the same time. But the French here is theatrical or poetic French, which voices final syllables. For example, the word prendre is a single syllable in spoken French with the dre formed by the tongue but not voiced. In theatrical French, it is sounded simply because the unvoiced syllable wouldn't be heard in a theater. Massenet's use of tone and rhythm to recreate the prosody of poetic French in music was probably equaled only by Mussorgsky in his setting of Russian.

      Manon is technically an opéra comique. That doesn't mean it's a comic opera (Carmen, obviously a tragedy, is also an opéra comique); it's a mixed form that uses spoken dialogue, something like the operetta. As in operetta or American musical comedy, the transition between speech and song runs the risk of feeling forced. You know the feeling at a performance of, say, Music Man or The Sound of Music, when you see the conductor raise his baton and the musicians get ready to play and you think, “Oh. We're going to have a song now.” Not in Massenet. Massenet's orchestra plays during the dialogue, underlining the drama. And when the emotion is strong, the characters break into singing in a way that feels natural.