48 Facts About Jules Massenet

Jules Emile Frederic Massenet was a French composer of the Romantic era best known for his operas, of which he wrote more than thirty.

Jules Massenet composed oratorios, ballets, orchestral works, incidental music, piano pieces, songs and other music.

Jules Massenet had a good sense of the theatre and of what would succeed with the Parisian public.

Jules Massenet taught composition there from 1878 until 1896, when he resigned after the death of the director, Ambroise Thomas.

Jules Massenet was born on 12 May 1842 at Montaud, then an outlying hamlet and now a part of the city of Saint-Etienne, in the Loire.

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Jules Massenet was the youngest of the four children of Alexis Massenet and his second wife Eleonore-Adelaide nee Royer de Marancour ; the elder children were Julie, Leon and Edmond.

Jules Massenet was educated at the Lycee Saint-Louis and, from either 1851 or 1853, the Paris Conservatoire.

Jules Massenet pursued his studies, with modest distinction, until the beginning of 1855, when family concerns disrupted his education.

Alexis Jules Massenet's health was poor, and on medical advice he moved from Paris to Chambery in the south of France; the family, including Jules Massenet, moved with him.

The family's finances were no longer comfortable, and to support himself Jules Massenet took private piano students and played as a percussionist in theatre orchestras.

Traditionally, many students at the Conservatoire went on to substantial careers as church organists; with that in mind Jules Massenet enrolled for organ classes, but they were not a success and he quickly abandoned the instrument.

Jules Massenet gained some work as a piano accompanist, in the course of which he met Wagner who, along with Berlioz, was one of his two musical heroes.

In 1861 Jules Massenet's music was published for the first time, the Grande Fantasie de Concert sur le Pardon de Ploermel de Meyerbeer, a virtuoso piano work in nine sections.

At that time the academy was dominated by painters rather than musicians; Jules Massenet enjoyed his time there, and made lifelong friendships with, among others, the sculptor Alexandre Falguiere and the painter Carolus-Duran, but the musical benefit he derived was largely self-taught.

Jules Massenet absorbed the music at St Peter's, and closely studied the works of the great German masters, from Handel and Bach to contemporary composers.

Jules Massenet and Ninon fell in love, but marriage was out of the question while he was a student with modest means.

Jules Massenet made a living by teaching the piano and publishing songs, piano pieces and orchestral suites, all in the popular style of the day.

At Thomas's instigation, Jules Massenet was commissioned to write a one-act opera comique, La grand'tante, presented in April 1867.

In October 1866 Jules Massenet and Ninon were married; their only child, Juliette, was born in 1868.

Jules Massenet found the war so "utterly terrible" that he refused to write about it in his memoirs.

Jules Massenet was a prolific composer; he put this down to his way of working, rising early and composing from four o'clock in the morning until midday, a practice he maintained all his life.

Jules Massenet had been made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1876, and in 1878 he was appointed professor of counterpoint, fugue and composition at the Conservatoire under Thomas, who was now the director.

Camille Saint-Saens, whom Jules Massenet beat in the election for the vacancy, was resentful at being passed over for a younger composer.

Jules Massenet was a popular and respected teacher at the Conservatoire.

Jules Massenet's pupils included Bruneau, Charpentier, Chausson, Hahn, Leroux, Pierne, Rabaud and Vidal.

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Jules Massenet was known for the care he took in drawing out his pupils' ideas, never trying to impose his own.

Jules Massenet's growing reputation did not prevent a contretemps with the Paris Opera in 1879.

The work finally reached Paris in February 1884, by which time Jules Massenet had established himself as the leading French opera composer of his generation.

Jules Massenet worked on Werther intermittently for several years, but it was rejected by the Opera-Comique as too gloomy.

Jules Massenet developed passionate feelings for her, which remained platonic, although it was widely believed in Paris that she was his mistress, as caricatures in the journals hinted with varying degrees of subtlety.

Jules Massenet did not complete his next project, Amadis, and it was not until 1892 that he recovered his earlier successful form.

The Times commented that in this piece Jules Massenet had adopted the verismo style of such works as Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana to great effect.

Jules Massenet wrote in 1910 that he had remained in post as professor out of loyalty to Thomas, and was eager to abandon all academic work in favour of composing, a statement repeated by his biographers Hugh Macdonald and Demar Irvine.

Jules Massenet was succeeded as professor by Gabriel Faure, who was doubtful of Massenet's credentials, considering his popular style to be "based on a generally cynical view of art".

Macdonald comments that at the start of the 20th century Jules Massenet was in the enviable position of having his works included in every season of the Opera and the Opera-Comique, and in opera houses around the world.

Jules Massenet was uninterested in Parisian society, and so shunned the limelight that in later life he preferred not to attend his own first nights.

Jules Massenet described himself as "a fireside man, a bourgeois artist".

Unlike some other French composers of the period, Jules Massenet never fell fully under Wagner's spell, but he took from the earlier composer a richness of orchestration and a fluency in treatment of musical themes.

Jules Massenet understood the capabilities of his singers, and composed with close, detailed regard for their voices.

In some of his operas, such as Esclarmonde and Le mage, Jules Massenet moved away from the traditional French pattern of free-standing arias and duets.

Between 1862 and 1900 Jules Massenet composed eight oratorios and cantatas, mostly on religious subjects.

Jules Massenet composed many other smaller-scale choral works, and more than two hundred songs.

Jules Massenet was a fluent and skilful orchestrator, and willingly provided ballet episodes for his operas, incidental music for plays, and a one-act stand-alone ballet for Vienna .

Parisian critic, after seeing La grand' tante, declared that Jules Massenet was a symphonist rather than a theatre composer.

Jules Massenet was temperamentally unsuited to writing symphonically: the constraints of sonata form bored him.

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Only known recording made by Jules Massenet is an excerpt from Sapho, "Pendant un an je fus ta femme", in which he plays a piano accompaniment for the soprano Georgette Leblanc.

Many individual melodies by Jules Massenet were included in mixed recitals on record during the 20th century, and more have been committed to disc since then, including, for the first time, a CD in 2012, exclusively devoted to his songs for soprano and piano.

Fuller Maitland contended that to discerning music lovers such as himself the operas of Jules Massenet were "inexpressibly monotonous", and he predicted that they would all be forgotten after the composer's death.