Massenet was one of the best-respected French composers of his day, a member of the Academy and a professor of composition at the Conservatoire. In addition to his own music, he had a monumental impact on his contemporaries in France and, through his teaching, the generation that followed him. I have included his oratorios in this list because of their broad dramatic construction; in fact, at least one of them (Marie-Magdalene) was restaged as an opera during Massenet's lifetime.

The leading operatic composer of his generation in France, Jules Massenet studied at the Paris Conservatoire, winning the Prix de Rome in 1863. In Paris once more, after his obligatory three years stay at the Villa Medici in Rome, he achieved initial success with his operas Don César de Bazan and Marie-Madeleine, the latter heroine, a repentant female sinner, exercising a particular interest and influence on Massenet's future work. He maintained a dominant position in French opera at least until the appearance of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, an innovative work that nevertheless shows something of the influence of Massenet.

Of some three dozen stage works, Massenet's opera Manon is perhaps the best known, a version of the novel by the Abbé Prévost also used by Puccini. The opera Werther is based on Goethe's Sorrows of the Young Werther, while Thaïs is known by name to many because of the famous violin solo, Méditation. The opera Le Cid, based on the play by Corneille on the subject of the historical Spanish hero and first staged in Paris in 1885, has a spectacular second act ballet-fiesta, which forms part of a subsequent orchestral suite.