About the work
Lyric drama in seven scenes by Hans Werner Henze to a libretto by Grete Weil and Walter Jockisch after Abbé Prévost's novel "Histoire du chevalier Des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut" (1731), first performed on 17 February 1952 at the Landestheater Hannover, directed by Jockisch and conducted by Johannes Schüler. Henze, who had met the two librettists in 1950, relocated the story to contemporary Paris and built the score on a single twelve-tone row.
Plot
The student Armand and the young Manon meet by chance at a Paris railway station and decide to start a new life together. When their money runs out, Manon becomes the mistress of wealthy admirers while Armand descends into drug addiction. After Manon's brother Lescaut shoots one of her patrons, she is arrested and banished from the city.
Cultural significance
As Henze's first full-length opera, the work deliberately adopted an unsentimental narrative stance indebted to epic theatre, setting itself apart from the lyrical treatments of the same material by Auber, Massenet and Puccini. Little noticed at first, Boulevard Solitude is now considered one of the young Henze's most widely performed works.