1842–1912 · France · 20th century
Jules Massenet (1842–1912) was a French composer best known for his operas; Manon and Werther are staged most often. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire under Ambroise Thomas, won the Prix de Rome and taught composition there for many years. Besides operas he wrote oratorios, ballets, orchestral works, piano pieces and more than two hundred songs.
Jules Massenet was born in May 1842 in Montaud, a remote hamlet in the Loire department that was later absorbed by Saint-Étienne. He was the youngest of four children. His father, Alexis Massenet, did well as an ironmongery merchant, and his mother, Eléonore-Adélaïde, was a gifted amateur musician and the first person to teach Jules the piano. In February 1848 the family moved to Paris, and Jules went to the Lycée Saint-Louis.
The boy entered the Paris Conservatoire while still at school, and kept attending the lycée at the same time. Augustin Savard taught him solfège and François Laurent taught him the piano. In early 1855 family circumstances forced him to break off his studies: on his doctors' advice his father moved to Chambéry, and the family followed. Later Jules returned to Paris and resumed his work at the Conservatoire.
By 1859 Massenet had made great progress and won the main prize among the Conservatoire's pianists. He felt awkward living off his family, so he gave private piano lessons and played percussion in a theatre orchestra, where he got to know Gounod's operas and those of other composers well. He soon gave up the organ class, where he had no success. Working as an accompanist, he met Richard Wagner, whom he admired, as he did Berlioz.
In 1861 Massenet's music first appeared in print: a virtuoso piano piece in nine sections, the Grande fantaisie de concert on Meyerbeer. He finished Ambroise Thomas's composition class and in 1863 won the Prix de Rome, the Conservatoire's highest award, whose earlier winners included Berlioz, Thomas, Gounod and Bizet. Berlioz and Thomas were on the jury, and every competitor was asked to write a cantata to the same text by Gustave Chouquet about the life of David Rizzio.
The prize paid for three years of study, two thirds of which Massenet spent at the French Academy in Rome, at the Villa Medici. Mostly painters, not musicians, studied there. Among the friends he made for life were Carolus-Duran, a painter, and Alexandre Falguière, a sculptor, but in music he largely taught himself: he absorbed the music heard in St Peter's and studied German composers from Handel and Bach to his own contemporaries. In Rome he met Franz Liszt, at whose request he began teaching the piano to Louise-Constance Ninon de Gressy, whose father was a rich supporter of Liszt. The two fell in love, but while Massenet was a poor student there was no talk of marriage.
Massenet returned to Paris in 1866. He earned his living by teaching the piano and published songs, piano pieces and orchestral suites in the popular style of the day. At Thomas's instigation he was commissioned to write a one-act comic opera, La grand'tante, which was staged in April 1867. A meeting in 1868 with Georges Hartmann gave him a publisher who also acted as his mentor for a quarter of a century; Hartmann's contacts with journalists did much to build the composer's reputation.
In October 1866 Massenet married Ninon, and in 1868 their only daughter, Juliette, was born. The Franco-Prussian War, which began in 1870, cut his career short: together with his friend Bizet he volunteered for the National Guard. He found the war dreadful and would not discuss it in his memoirs. The family were caught in besieged Paris but they escaped before the Paris Commune began and spent several months living in Bayonne.
Back in Paris after the war, Massenet completed his first large-scale work, the four-act comic opera Don César de Bazan (1872). It was fated to fail, but success came in 1873, when he wrote the music for Les Érinnyes, a tragedy by Leconte de Lisle, and the dramatic oratorio Marie-Magdeleine; both were performed at the Odéon. His reputation was growing, but at that stage he still earned his living mainly from teaching, six hours a day.
Massenet was prolific because he kept to a strict routine: he rose early and composed from four in the morning until noon, and he did so all his life. He generally worked cleanly and rarely revised, but he struggled for several years with the opera Le roi de Lahore before he was satisfied. Its story comes from the Mahabharata; the opera was finished in 1877 and became one of the first productions at the Paris Opéra's new house, which had opened two years earlier. It was also staged in Hungary, in Bavaria, in Dresden, in Madrid and at Covent Garden in London.
That period was the peak of his career. In 1876 Massenet became a Knight of the Legion of Honour, and in 1878 he joined the Conservatoire, then directed by Thomas, as professor of counterpoint, fugue and composition. In that same year he also entered the Institut de France, a distinction few composers received at his age, in their thirties or forties. Camille Saint-Saëns, who also wanted the vacant seat, was hurt. He was elected three years later, but relations between the two men remained cool.
Massenet taught at the Conservatoire from 1878 to 1896 and was held in respect. Those who studied with him were Charpentier, Chausson, Pierné, Rabaud, Vidal, Bruneau, Hahn, Leroux and Schjelderup, and one of his last students was Charles Koechlin. He paid close attention to his pupils' ideas and never tried to impose his own. Koechlin remembered him as a professor who loved to talk and taught in a lively, energetic way.
In 1879, despite his growing fame, Massenet ran into trouble with the Paris Opéra: its director, Auguste Vaucorbeil, refused to stage Hérodiade, judging the libretto unsuitable. Édouard-Fortuné Calabresi, who shared the running of Brussels's Théâtre de la Monnaie, at once offered to put it on there. The premiere took place in December 1881, the production was given 55 times, and two months later the opera was shown at La Scala. Paris saw it only in February 1884; by then Massenet ranked as the foremost French opera composer of his day.
Manon opened at the Opéra-Comique to enormous acclaim and was later taken up by major theatres in Europe and America. It took its place beside Faust by Gounod and Carmen by Bizet as one of the pillars of the French repertoire. Next Massenet returned to grand opera and created Le Cid (1885).
After the two triumphs came years when successes alternated with failures. The Opéra-Comique rejected Werther as too gloomy, and Massenet worked on it on and off for several years. The American soprano Sibyl Sanderson entered his life in 1887; for her he rewrote Manon and composed Esclarmonde (1889). In 1891 Le mage failed, and Amadis was left unfinished. His fortunes were restored in February 1892, when Werther was at last staged: the Vienna Opera had asked for a new work after the enthusiastic Austrian reception of Manon.
Werther was heard in Paris in January 1893. Productions followed in America, Italy and Britain, but audiences stayed calm, and the opera only found real popularity after the Opéra-Comique revived it in 1903. Thaïs (1894), written for Sanderson, was also received coolly at first; it reached a wider audience when it was staged again four years later, by which time the composer's name was no longer linked with the singer. The same year London gave a warm reception to La Navarraise at Covent Garden. The audience gave the composer an ovation, but Massenet, a shy man, did not come on stage at all.
In February 1896 Ambroise Thomas, the director of the Conservatoire, died. On 6 May the government offered the post to Massenet, who declined; the next day another teacher, Théodore Dubois, was appointed director, and Massenet submitted his resignation as professor of composition. In November 1897 Sapho was given at the Opéra-Comique with great success, and in May 1899 came Cendrillon, his own version of the familiar fairy tale.
By the early twentieth century Massenet was in an enviable position: his operas were played every season at the Théâtre Lyrique and the Opéra-Comique, and in theatres worldwide. He went on working hard and, on the whole, successfully. By his own recollection, in 1905 he declined the directorship of the Conservatoire for a second time. What he cared for was home life, whether in Paris on the rue de Vaugirard or at his house in the country at Égreville; high society did not interest him, and in his later years he preferred not to attend his own premieres. His last triumph was Don Quichotte (1910). Although his output had slowed, in his final years he wrote four more operas: Bacchus and Roma, then Panurge and Cléopâtre, which reached the stage only after he had died.
In August 1912 Massenet travelled from Égreville to Paris to see his doctor. For several months he had suffered from cancer of the abdomen, although at first the illness looked harmless. Within a few days his condition worsened sharply, and his wife and family hurried to Paris and stayed with him until the end. The composer died on 13 August 1912.
Massenet is known above all as an opera composer, with more than thirty operas to his name. The exact number is hard to give, because some early works are lost, some operas remained unfinished and some exist in several versions. He wrote in a wide range of genres, from comic opera (Manon) to grand opera (Le roi de Lahore), and worked with more than thirty librettists. According to theatre statistics for the 2012–2013 seasons, Werther was staged most often, followed by Manon, Don Quichotte and Thaïs.
Massenet also wrote vocal music outside the theatre. Between 1862 and 1900 eight oratorios and cantatas came from him, mostly religious in subject, along with many other choral works. Massenet wrote more than two hundred songs, and his early collections were especially popular. For them he chose poems by a wide variety of poets, including Musset, Maupassant, Hugo and Gautier, as well as Tennyson and Shelley in French translation.
Massenet's style is hard to reduce to a single formula: his subjects and musical language vary widely. His biographer Hugh Macdonald names Gounod, Thomas, Meyerbeer and Berlioz among his models, and Verdi and Mascagni among foreign composers, perhaps Wagner too; from the early Wagner he took richness of orchestration and an approach to musical themes. Parisians were drawn to the exotic side of his subjects: his operas are set in ancient Egypt, mythical Greece, biblical Galilee, Renaissance Spain, India and revolutionary Paris. His experience as an orchestral player let him obtain unusual colours without rare instruments, and he wrote out every part carefully and in detail. At times his operas contain noisy, harsh scenes, but most of the music is gentle and delicate.
Orchestral music takes up less space. Massenet wrote colourful orchestral suites, the symphonic poem Visions (1891), the overture Phèdre (1873), and in Vienna he gave the one-act ballet Le carillon (1892). He wrote little chamber music: three pieces for cello and piano survive. He also wrote a single piano concerto, which Louis Diémer performed. Our site has his Élégie and Chœur des Pastorale, DO.287 for voice and piano, both of upper-intermediate difficulty.