1836–1891 · France
Léo Delibes (1836–1891) was a French composer, who wrote the opera Lakmé and the ballets Coppélia and Sylvia. He made a great contribution to the development of ballet, giving its music more importance than was customary. The site has sheet music for his waltz Grande valse du Pas des fleurs, graded Intermediate+.
Delibes was born on 21 February 1836 in Saint-Germain-du-Val, which is now part of La Flèche. His father worked for the post office, and his mother was the daughter of a singer at the Opéra-Comique. The boy was the only child of the couple. He was taught music by his mother and by an uncle who was an organist and taught singing at the Paris Conservatoire.
In 1847 the boy lost his father, and the family relocated to Paris. Shortly after he turned twelve, the boy entered the Paris Conservatoire. His earliest teacher of music theory was Tariot. Delibes won second prize in solfège in 1849, then first prize in 1850.
He studied the organ with François Benoist and composition with Adolphe Adam and François Bazin. Adam, his composition teacher, set the young musician an example of a sparkling operetta manner.
Even as a boy, Delibes sang in the choir of the church of La Madeleine. At the premiere of Meyerbeer's opera Le prophète on 11 April 1849 he sang in the boys' chorus. His voice was unusually beautiful.
He became organist of the church of Saint-Pierre de Chaillot and at the same time worked at the Parisian Théâtre Lyrique as an accompanist and répétiteur. There he helped prepare the greater part of the repertoire, among them The Marriage of Figaro, Fidelio and Gounod's Faust. Delibes kept his church post until 1871, but the theatre drew him more strongly.
The first stage work by Delibes, a comic one-acter called Deux sous de charbon, reached the public in 1856 at the Folies-Nouvelles. After it he kept turning out comic operas, roughly one every year, and many of them were meant for the Bouffes-Parisiens, which Jacques Offenbach ran.
His second opera, Deux vieilles gardes, was a huge success. His biographer Hugh Macdonald puts it down to the composer's talent for amusing tunes and a deft, light hand. The music of the earlier piece, Deux sous de charbon, has not survived to this day.
Besides composing, Delibes earned his living in other ways. For a short time in 1858 he was a critic, and he worked as an inspector of school music; he then joined the Opéra, first as accompanist and afterwards as chorus master. That appointment opened a new path for him, into ballet.
In 1866 Delibes was commissioned to write two acts of the ballet La Source; the other two were by Ludwig Minkus. It was staged at the Paris Opéra, and Delibes's pages caught the attention of musicians and ballet lovers. The critic Adolphe Jullien wrote that Delibes showed such a wealth of melody that Minkus was left entirely in the shade. The composer's real fame began in 1865 with his cantata Alger, and above all with this ballet; his first thirteen small operas had not brought him much renown.
In May 1870 the Opéra staged Coppélia. The plot is based on a story by Hoffmann about old Dr Coppélius and his doll Coppélia. The success was immediate, and the ballet remains one of the most popular in the classical repertoire. Delibes wrote a musical portrait for each leading character and made wide use of national dances, the bolero, czardas, jig and mazurka, constantly mixed with waltz rhythms.
A year later he left the Opéra's music staff to give all his time to writing music.
He did not want a reputation as merely a ballet composer, so he took up songs. His 1872 collection includes Myrto, Les Filles de Cadiz and Bonjour Suzon. In the view of the music scholar Graham Johnson, reflective feeling suited Delibes better than passion, and his best songs are the earlier ones.
In 1873 the Opéra-Comique mounted Le Roi l'a dit, his comic opera in three acts. It was liked in the French capital and at German theatres, yet it never became a regular part of the international repertoire. In 1876 Delibes came back to the Opéra with a big mythological ballet, Sylvia, or the Nymph of Diana, set in Greece, which critics and audiences welcomed.
Delibes also hoped to produce a weighty vocal piece. His dramatic scene La Mort d'Orphée was performed at Trocadéro concerts in 1878, the year of the World Fair. At the Opéra-Comique in 1880 came the first night of a serious opera, Jean de Nivelle. Reviewers found it too episodic but noted the precision and rare quality of its melodies. It was performed more than a hundred times.
In the early 1880s Delibes was given the composition professorship at the Conservatoire, even though he himself confessed that fugue and counterpoint were a closed book to him. He took the duties very seriously. The critic Charles Darcours recalled how the composer cared for his students and worried about their success in the Prix de Rome.
In 1882 the Comédie-Française revived Victor Hugo's play Le Roi s'amuse, and Delibes wrote for it an orchestral suite of dances in the old manner as well as a mandolin-accompanied song.
The opera Lakmé was first performed at the Opéra-Comique on 14 April 1883. The theatre's manager, Léon Carvalho, a man not noted for lavish spending, staged it with unexpected lavishness. The story is about the love of a British officer and the daughter of an Indian priest, and the oriental colour of the music is set against the world of the English colonists. The Flower Duet and the aria with bells became standard numbers, and thanks to frequent quotation even opera sceptics know them.
European theatres quickly took up the opera, and then London staged it in 1885 and New York in 1886. American reviews were enthusiastic and British ones more restrained, but in both cities the performances made money.
In 1884 Delibes was elected a member of the Académie des beaux-arts. His last years were comfortable and socially secure. The composer was ill from time to time.
Kassya, another opera, was his final work and was still unfinished when Delibes died on 16 January 1891 in his Paris home, following a sudden collapse. The composer was buried in Montmartre Cemetery. Jules Massenet prepared the opera and orchestrated it; it was staged in 1893.
Delibes is known chiefly as the author of ballets, operas and operettas. More than thirty operas and operettas, twenty songs, men's choruses, a mass, several children's choruses and the dramatic scene La Mort d'Orphée make up his vocal output. But the composer's name is bound first of all to ballet: he enriched it with symphonic interest and gave the music greater importance than was customary.
Of the ballets, Coppélia and Sylvia are staged most often. Tchaikovsky admired both. He rated Sylvia so highly that he wrote that, had he known this music earlier, Swan Lake would not have been written by him. The critic Carl Van Vechten regarded Delibes as a reformer of ballet music, since his scores introduced symphonic writing, abundant melody and rich harmony. Lakmé is regarded as Delibes's chief achievement in opera.
The first compositions of Delibes belong to the line of Boieldieu, Hérold and his teacher Adam, who gave him a model of sparkling operetta style. Once he consciously aimed higher than light popular music, Meyerbeer and Gounod left their mark, and so does that of Bizet and Lalo, who were a little younger. Notices of his early music often come back to the same few words: lightness, wit, grace, charm, colour and elegance.
In Coppélia, Delibes developed the use of leitmotifs, which had been modest in Adam: every leading character has a musical theme of his or her own, which lets the score paint characters and moods. His songs are close in spirit to the chansonnette, and Les filles de Cadix, a Spanish song, shows his skill at conjuring local colour.
Lakmé is generally regarded as his best achievement in opera. Its music is melodic, picturesque and strong in the theatre, and the two chief male roles are vividly drawn. The lighter Le Roi l'a dit leans heavily on intricate vocal numbers for several voices and clever pastiche.
The site has the waltz Grande valse du Pas des fleurs for solo piano, at the Intermediate+ level. Delibes's music is still heard both at dance competitions and in concerts: in 2014 the pizzicato variation from Sylvia was played at the New Year's concert in Vienna.