Jules Massenet

Jules Émile Frédéric Massenet was a French composer of the Romantic era, born on 12 May 1842 in Montaud, a locality now part of the city of Saint-Étienne in the Loire region of France. He died on 13 August 1912. Best known for his operas, Massenet wrote more than thirty of them over the course of his career, with Manon (1884) and Werther (1892) remaining the most frequently staged. His output extended well beyond opera to include oratorios, ballets, orchestral works, incidental music, piano pieces, and songs. On Broadway, his credits include Thais and Victor Herbert's Concert.

Massenet was the youngest of four children born to Alexis Massenet, a prosperous ironmonger, and his second wife, Eléonore-Adelaïde née Royer de Marancour, an amateur musician who gave Jules his earliest piano lessons. The family relocated from Montaud to Paris by early 1848, settling in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Massenet received his general education at the Lycée Saint-Louis while simultaneously pursuing musical studies at the Paris Conservatoire, which he entered either in 1851 or 1853, depending on the source. At the Conservatoire he studied solfège with Augustin Savard and piano with François Laurent. A period of family disruption in 1855, prompted by his father's poor health and a move to Chambéry, temporarily interrupted his studies, though he returned to Paris and the Conservatoire in October of that year. By 1859 he had earned the institution's top prize for pianists. To support himself financially, he took private piano students and worked as a percussionist in theatre orchestras, an experience that gave him practical familiarity with the operatic repertoire of Gounod and others.

In 1861, Massenet's first published composition appeared: the Grande Fantasie de Concert sur le Pardon de Ploërmel de Meyerbeer, a virtuoso piano work in nine sections. He subsequently entered the composition class under Ambroise Thomas, a teacher he greatly admired, and competed for the Prix de Rome, France's most prestigious musical honor. Previous winners had included Berlioz, Thomas, Gounod, and Bizet. Massenet won the prize in 1863, with Berlioz among the judges who supported his candidacy. The award funded a three-year period of study, the majority of which was spent at the French Academy in Rome at the Villa Medici. There he formed lasting friendships with sculptor Alexandre Falguière and painter Carolus-Duran, studied the works of German masters from Handel and Bach onward, and absorbed the music performed at St. Peter's. During his Roman stay he also met Franz Liszt, at whose request he gave piano lessons to Louise-Constance "Ninon" de Gressy, the daughter of one of Liszt's patrons. Massenet and Ninon fell in love, and they married in October 1866 following his return to Paris. Their only child, Juliette, was born in 1868.

Back in Paris, Massenet supported himself through piano teaching and the publication of songs, piano pieces, and orchestral suites. At Thomas's instigation, he received a commission from the Opéra-Comique and presented his one-act opéra comique La grand'tante in April 1867. In 1868 he formed a relationship with publisher and mentor Georges Hartmann, whose journalistic connections helped advance Massenet's reputation over the following twenty-five years. His career was briefly interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, during which he served as a volunteer in the National Guard alongside Bizet. He and his family were caught in the siege of Paris before managing to leave the city ahead of the Paris Commune.

Between 1867 and his death, Massenet produced more than forty stage works spanning a wide range of styles, from opéra-comique to grand-scale treatments of classical myths, romantic comedies, and lyric dramas, in addition to cantatas, oratorios, and ballets. His understanding of theatrical effect and of Parisian audience tastes made him the dominant opera composer in France during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1878 he joined the faculty of the Paris Conservatoire as a professor of composition, a post he held until 1896, when he resigned following the death of Ambroise Thomas, who had by then become the institution's director. Among the students he taught during those years were Gustave Charpentier, Ernest Chausson, Reynaldo Hahn, and Gabriel Pierné.

By the time of his death, some critics considered Massenet's style old-fashioned, though Manon and Werther continued to be performed in France and abroad. After a period of relative neglect, his works underwent a favorable critical reassessment beginning in the mid-twentieth century, and many have since been both staged and recorded. Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians characterized him as a second-rate composer who nonetheless merited recognition as a first-class example of that rank, comparing him in that respect to Richard Strauss. His operas are now broadly regarded as well-crafted works of the Belle Époque.