Élégie
Jules Massenet
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Browse piano sheets by Jules Massenet on Zen Virtual Piano. Massenet was born the twelfth child in a typical bourgeois provincial family, and he first studied piano with his mother, a talented amateur musician. His father was a prosperous ironmonger, and while still a schoolboy Massenet was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied under Ambroise Thomas, whom he greatly admired. When the family's finances were no longer comfortable, he took private piano students and played as a percussionist in theatre orchestras to support himself. A boy admitted to the Conservatoire while still at school and then playing percussion in theatres to pay his way shows two very different rooms of the same city. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 briefly interrupted his musical career; he served in it as a National Guard volunteer next to his friend Bizet. He put his prolific output down to his working habits: he rose early and composed from four o'clock in the morning until midday, as he did all his life. A four o'clock start that he never gave up may help explain how much he left behind, and the habit seems to have outlasted every change in his fortunes. Although he drew on Wagner for a richness of orchestration and a fluency in handling musical themes, he never fell fully under Wagner's spell, as some other French composers of the period did. Manon had its first performances at the Opéra-Comique in January 1884 and was a prodigious success, after which major opera houses in Europe and the United States staged it. Don Quichotte in 1910 was his last major success; L'Etoile called it a very Parisian evening and, naturally, a very Parisian triumph. A success in 1884 and another in 1910 show a career that reached both ends of a long working life. The Invocation in Les Érinnyes accompanies Electra pouring libations on Agamemnon's tomb in act 2; it still gets performed and recorded often, and it was also issued on its own as the Élégie for cello and orchestra (Op. 10, no. 5) and as the song O doux printemps d'autrefois. Parisian society held little interest for him, and he avoided the limelight so thoroughly that, late in life, he preferred to stay away from his own first nights; he described himself as a fireside man, a bourgeois artist. A composer who avoided his own first nights and a piece that circulates as a cello elegy, a song and a theatre invocation show music that traveled further than he did.
Browse piano sheets by Jules Massenet on Zen Virtual Piano.
Massenet was born the twelfth child in a typical bourgeois provincial family, and he first studied piano with his mother, a talented amateur musician. His father was a prosperous ironmonger, and while still a schoolboy Massenet was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied under Ambroise Thomas, whom he greatly admired. When the family's finances were no longer comfortable, he took private piano students and played as a percussionist in theatre orchestras to support himself. A boy admitted to the Conservatoire while still at school and then playing percussion in theatres to pay his way shows two very different rooms of the same city.
The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 briefly interrupted his musical career; he served in it as a National Guard volunteer next to his friend Bizet. He put his prolific output down to his working habits: he rose early and composed from four o'clock in the morning until midday, as he did all his life. A four o'clock start that he never gave up may help explain how much he left behind, and the habit seems to have outlasted every change in his fortunes.
Although he drew on Wagner for a richness of orchestration and a fluency in handling musical themes, he never fell fully under Wagner's spell, as some other French composers of the period did. Manon had its first performances at the Opéra-Comique in January 1884 and was a prodigious success, after which major opera houses in Europe and the United States staged it. Don Quichotte in 1910 was his last major success; L'Etoile called it a very Parisian evening and, naturally, a very Parisian triumph. A success in 1884 and another in 1910 show a career that reached both ends of a long working life.
The Invocation in Les Érinnyes accompanies Electra pouring libations on Agamemnon's tomb in act 2; it still gets performed and recorded often, and it was also issued on its own as the Élégie for cello and orchestra (Op. 10, no. 5) and as the song O doux printemps d'autrefois. Parisian society held little interest for him, and he avoided the limelight so thoroughly that, late in life, he preferred to stay away from his own first nights; he described himself as a fireside man, a bourgeois artist. A composer who avoided his own first nights and a piece that circulates as a cello elegy, a song and a theatre invocation show music that traveled further than he did.
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Jules Massenet was a French opera composer who studied at the Paris Conservatoire under Ambroise Thomas and wrote Manon, first given at the Opéra-Comique in January 1884.
The Invocation from Massenet's Les Érinnyes, it was also published on its own as the song O doux printemps d'autrefois and as the Élégie for cello and orchestra, Op. 10, no. 5.
He attributed his output to rising early and composing from four in the morning until midday, a habit he kept all his life.
He became Massenet's publisher after they met in 1868 and was his mentor for twenty-five years.