page_title: Jules Massenet
section_title: Early years
hierarchical_section_title: Jules Massenet / Biography / Early years
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of the young Jules Massenet
context_page_description: Jules Émile Frédéric Massenet was a French composer of the Romantic era best known for his operas, of which he wrote more than thirty. The two most frequently staged are Manon and Werther. He also composed oratorios, ballets, orchestral works, incidental music, piano pieces, songs and other music.
  While still a schoolboy, Massenet was admitted to France's principal music college, the Paris Conservatoire. There he studied under Ambroise Thomas, whom he greatly admired. After winning the country's top musical prize, the Prix de Rome, in 1863, he composed prolifically in many genres, but quickly became best known for his operas. Between 1867 and his death forty-five years later he wrote more than forty stage works in a wide variety of styles, from opéra-comique to grand-scale depictions of classical myths, romantic comedies, lyric dramas, as well as oratorios, cantatas and ballets. Massenet had a good sense of the theatre and of what would succeed with the Parisian public. Despite some miscalculations, he produced a series of successes that made him the leading composer of opera in France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
context_section_description: Massenet was born on 12 May 1842 at Montaud, then an outlying hamlet and now a part of the city of Saint-Étienne, in the Loire. He was the youngest of the four children of Alexis Massenet (1788–1863) and his second wife Eléonore-Adelaïde née Royer de Marancour (1809–1875); the elder children were Julie, Léon and Edmond. Massenet senior was a prosperous ironmonger; his wife was a talented amateur musician who gave Jules his first piano lessons. By early 1848 the family had moved to Paris, where they settled in a flat in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Massenet was educated at the Lycée Saint-Louis and, from either 1851 or 1853, the Paris Conservatoire. According to his colourful but unreliable memoirs, Massenet auditioned in October 1851, when he was nine, before a judging panel comprising Daniel Auber, Fromental Halévy, Ambroise Thomas and Michele Carafa, and was admitted at once. His biographer Demar Irvine dates the audition and admission as January 1853. Both sources agree that Massenet continued his general education at the lycée in tandem with his musical studies.
  At the Conservatoire Massenet studied solfège with Augustin Savard and the piano with François Laurent. He pursued his studies, with modest distinction, until the beginning of 1855, when family concerns disrupted his education. Alexis Massenet's health was poor, and on medical advice he moved from Paris to Chambéry in the south of France; the family, including Massenet, moved with him. Again, Massenet's own memoirs and the researches of his biographers are at variance: the composer recalled his exile in Chambéry as lasting for two years; Henry Finck and Irvine record that the young man returned to Paris and the Conservatoire in October 1855. On his return he lodged with relations in Montmartre and resumed his studies; by 1859 he had progressed so far as to win the Conservatoire's top prize for pianists. The family's finances were no longer comfortable, and to support himself Massenet took private piano students and played as a percussionist in theatre orchestras. His work in the orchestra pit gave him a good working knowledge of the operas of Gounod and other composers, classic and contemporary. Traditionally, many students at the Conservatoire went on to substantial careers as church organists; with that in mind Massenet enrolled for organ classes, but they were not a success and he quickly abandoned the instrument. He 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 Massenet's music was published for the first time, the Grande Fantasie de Concert sur le Pardon de Ploërmel de Meyerbeer , a virtuoso piano work in nine sections. Having graduated to the composition class under Ambroise Thomas, Massenet was entered for the Conservatoire's top musical honour, the Prix de Rome, previous winners of which included Berlioz, Thomas, Gounod and Bizet. The first two of these were on the judging panel for the 1863 competition. All the competitors had to set the same text by Gustave Chouquet, a cantata about David Rizzio; after all the settings had been performed Massenet came face to face with the judges. He recalled:
   Ambroise Thomas, my beloved master, came towards me and said, "Embrace Berlioz, you owe him a great deal for your prize." "The prize," I cried, bewildered, my face shining with joy. "I have the prize!!!" I was deeply moved and I embraced Berlioz, then my master, and finally Monsieur Auber. Monsieur Auber comforted me. Did I need comforting? Then he said to Berlioz pointing to me, "He'll go far, the young rascal, when he's had less experience!"
  The prize brought a well-subsidised three-year period of study, two-thirds of which was spent at the French Academy in Rome, based at the Villa Medici. At that time the academy was dominated by painters rather than musicians; Massenet enjoyed his time there, and made lifelong friendships with, among others, the sculptor Alexandre Falguière and the painter Carolus-Duran, but the musical benefit he derived was largely self-taugh
caption: Massenet in the early 1860s
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