Fit only for a public “which regards music as an agreeable after-dinner entertainment” was how the writer of the authoritative Grove’s Dictionary described Massenet’s operas in 1954. One would hesitate to venture such an opinion today — if only for fear of retribution. Yet there are moments in Manon, mostly in the first two acts, when the charge of meretricious diversion seems justified.

The Royal Opera effectively counters that charge by bringing in the inspirational French director Laurent Pelly to search out the work’s social critique, and by casting two stars in the central roles.

Manon is the tragedy of a woman who chooses the good life over true love and lives to regret it. She’s the good-time girl lusted after by Second Empire phallocrats (Pelly updates the action to Massenet’s own time) hiding their libidinous urges behind top hats and mutton-chop whiskers.

Stunning in a flouncy pink dress with white frills and ritzy hat, Anna Netrebko is a striking Manon. Pelly has his lechers circle her, gasping with admiration but groping like predators. Netrebko’s Manon has them in the palm of her hand, her control underlined by her formidable vocal delivery, complete with stratospheric E flat.

Their prurience is highlighted by Pelly when ballerinas arrive from the Opéra. Adopting crouching postures, they lift tutus with their canes, the better to see what they can expect after the show.

Manon, meanwhile, follows her abandoned lover, Des Grieux, to church, bare-armed and with heaving décolletage — clearly an impenitent sinner. In the gaming scene of the next act Netrebko arrives in a screaming cerise off-the-shoulder number. It’s a tough role for her. But if that frock marks the nadir of her venality, Netrebko is able to transform herself, both physically and vocally, into the shabbily dressed outcast of the last act. Shame she has to take her curtain-call in rags.

It’s during the gaming scene, however, that Antonio Pappano and his singers finally achieve the white-hot intensity one was hoping for. More than matching Netrebko for passion and control was the Des Grieux of the young Italian tenor Vittorio Grigolo, making his debut at Covent Garden. The thunderous ovation he received at curtain-call suggested that the audience sensed the birth of a star.

Until July 10. Information: 020 7304 4000; roh.org.uk