Manon Lescaut
metopera.org
From the Metropolitan Opera website:
Few operas have surpassed Manon Lescaut in the depiction of the urgency of young love. The French tale of a beautiful young woman destroyed by her conflicting needs for love and luxury had already inspired Massenet’s Manon (1884), a relatively new and immensely popular work at the time of Manon Lescaut’s premiere. Puccini made the story his own and infused it with a new level of frank emotion and a flood of melody. The opera was his first great success, leading George Bernard Shaw to name him “the successor to Verdi.”