Jules Massenet
Compositeur
His [Méditation] for violin is world-famous and his operas [Manon] and [Werther] are performed regularly in major opera houses: Jules Massenet was not only the leading French opera composer of the late Romantic period – as a professor at the Conservatoire de Paris, he was also mentor to a whole generation of Rome Prize winners, including Gabriel Pierné, Gustave Charpentier and Florent Schmitt.
Jules Massenet, born in 1842 near Saint-Étienne in the Loire department, was accepted into Adolphe Laurents’s piano class at the Conservatoire de Paris after early piano lessons from his mother and also received solfège lessons from Augustin Savards. He won the Premier Prix in piano in 1859. After further lessons in harmony and composition, Massenet was accepted into Ambroise Thomas’s composition class in 1861 – the same year as his first works appeared in print. After just six months in Thomas’s class, Massenet applied for the coveted Prix de Rome, which had been awarded annually since 1803 by the Académie des Beaux Arts to students in the composition classes of the Conservatoire de Paris. The coveted prize came with a scholarship and a stay at the Villa Médici in Rome. Massenet reached the final round, but it was not until the following year that he won the prize with his cantata [David Rizzio]. During his stay in Italy, he met Franz Liszt, who introduced him to his pupil Louise-Constance de Gressy, who was an excellent musician and who Massenet married in 1866. After his stage debut with [La Grand’Tante], Massenet worked on a range of opera projects and found an ambitious publisher for his works in Georges Hartmann. Massenet’s opera [Le Roi de Lahore], which premiered in Paris in 1877, finally established his dominant position on the French opera stage, which he held until the First World War. After successes in Italy and Brussels, he produced works such as [Le Cid], [Thaïs] and [Werther], the latter of which also caused a sensation in Vienna. At the beginning of 1910, Massenet’s health deteriorated rapidly. He died a highly respected composer in Paris on 13 August 1912.
