Jules Massenet

Jules Massenet, born near Saint-Étienne in 1842, was the dominant figure of French opera in the late nineteenth century, the man who, more than any other, defined the elegant, sensuous, melodically generous style of the Belle Époque stage. Trained at the Paris Conservatoire, where he won the Prix de Rome in 1863, he became a hugely successful and prolific composer of operas, among them Manon (1884) and Werther (1892), which remain repertoire staples, as well as Thaïs, Le Cid, and Don Quichotte. He was also an influential professor of composition at the Conservatoire, teaching a generation that included Gustave Charpentier and Reynaldo Hahn. Massenet had an unerring instinct for the long, caressing vocal line and for orchestral colour of refined sweetness, and though some later critics dismissed his charm as sentimentality, his finest music marries genuine craft to irresistible lyricism. He died in Paris in 1912, the most performed French opera composer of his age.