Jules Massenet

Prix de Rome at twenty-one, Massenet had entered the Paris Conservatoire as a boy from Montaud, near Saint-Étienne, and studied composition with Ambroise Thomas; from 1878 he taught there himself, and Gustave Charpentier, Reynaldo Hahn and Charles Koechlin passed through his class. His operas were accompanied by oratorios, ballets, orchestral suites, songs and sacred music. Manon, given at the Opéra-Comique in 1884, was based on the Abbé Prévost's novel; Werther, after Goethe, was first staged in Vienna in 1892. His operas also include Thaïs, Cendrillon, Hérodiade and Don Quichotte — the last written with Chaliapin's voice in mind. He died in Paris in 1912. Werther occupied him from 1885 to 1887, to a libretto by Édouard Blau, Paul Milliet and Georges Hartmann; the director of the Opéra-Comique refused it as too grave a subject, and it reached the stage in Vienna on 16 February 1892 in Max Kalbeck's German translation, the French version following in Geneva that December. Pourquoi me réveiller, the third-act aria, comes at the point where Werther understands that Charlotte loves him and is sent away all the same.