It’s a traditional kind of role in the sense that it leads to wonderful duets (with the very able Bulgarian tenor Kamen Chanev soaring with her in heroic fashion) and arias. We’ve already seen Racette, a singer with a rich, rangy voice, and in her case just as important, a gift, even a will to embody theatrically the parts she performs, in “Tosca,” but Manon, which she portrays for the first time in her career, is an entirely different challenge. In terms of both propensity of plot and music, this is early Puccini (1893), but it has all the earmarks and tells of his later grand works of genius, which followed “Lescaut-“La Boheme,” “Tosca” and “Madame Butterfly.” The way she’s embodied by soprano Patricia Racette in the Washington National Opera’s spring-season opener, there’s a lot to like, and even love about “Manon Lescaut,” both the character and the opera. That’s the setup, and you ask what’s to like about Manon. Manon, who’s pushed on Geronte by her brother Lescaut for his own advancement-has a go at real love with the dashing, sensitive and impassioned young Chevalier des Grieux before she’s spirited away into the wealthy arms and high life of the world of Geronte. On the surface of it, you have to wonder: Manon likes glitz, glitter and stuff, the high life, she is young, not exactly a femme fatale or even a practiced courtesan, but what she has is more than enough for Geronte, a wealthy, powerful, and need we say it, much older aristocrat who apparently sees her as a shiny elixir and rejuvenator of the flesh, a damsel he can dress up and own for his pleasure. Giacomo Puccini is said to have called Manon “a heroine I believe in. Manon Lescaut, a very young courtesan-type, seems to have attracted the genius successor to Verdi from the get-go, so much so that he ignored the fact that two operas had already been assayed about Manon, the heroine of a popular 18th-century novel by Abbe Prevost.

We know all about Mimi in “La Boheme” and “Madame Butterfly.” It’s a wonder he didn’t create Violetta, given his affinity for ladies dependent on men, falling in love with the wrong man, or ending up in tragic circumstances.

Heroine of puccini opera