Léo Delibes
A Parisian composer raised among church organs and theater rehearsal rooms, who brought symphonic dignity to ballet music.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Those close to him ⏳🌊
- TeacherAdolphe Adam
The composer of Giselle, who taught Delibes composition at the Paris Conservatoire and opened the path to ballet music for him.
- PatronageJacques Offenbach
He staged the young Delibes's operettas at his own Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens, giving him his first foothold as a composer for the stage.
- FamilyLéontine Estelle Denain
The daughter of a Comédie-Française actor, she married Delibes in 1871 and stood by him as he gave up his other posts to devote himself to composing.
- InfluencePyotr Tchaikovsky
He so admired Delibes's ballet music that, after hearing Sylvia, he wrote in a letter that had he known this music sooner, he would never have written Swan Lake.
- FriendshipJules Massenet
After Delibes's death, the unfinished opera Kassya was put in order and its orchestration completed, bringing it to its premiere in 1893.
I. The boy from La Flèche · 1836–1853 (age 0–17)
(Birth) He was born in February 1836 in Saint-Germain-du-Val (today part of La Flèche), in the Sarthe region of western France. His full name was Clément Philibert Léo Delibes. His father was a civil servant in the postal service, and his mother, Clémence Batiste, came from a family of musicians. His maternal grandfather had been a singer on the opera stage, and his uncle Édouard Batiste was a renowned Parisian organist and a professor at the Paris Conservatoire. (Loss) In 1847 his father died. His mother moved with the eleven-year-old boy to Paris. Almost nothing is recorded about any brothers or sisters. For the widowed mother, the family's musical connections were a vital support, and that same year the boy entered the Paris Conservatoire. (Choir) He sang as a choirboy at the Église de la Madeleine. In 1849, it is said, he stood among the young choristers at the premiere of Meyerbeer's grand opera Le prophète. From inside the stage he watched the spectacle of the Paris Opéra, where chorus, orchestra and stage machinery all moved as one. The theater was one of the first places where he learned music. (Conservatoire) At the Conservatoire he won first prize in solfège (the basic training in reading and singing from a score) in 1850. He went on to study organ with François Benoist and composition with Adolphe Adam. Adam was the composer of the ballet Giselle. It was in his teacher's work that he first learned what music for dance could do. The path by which he would later make his name in ballet began with this bond between master and pupil.
II. Between the organ and the theater · 1853–1866 (age 17–30)
(Two posts) In 1853, the seventeen-year-old Delibes took on two jobs at once. One was organist at the church of Saint-Pierre-de-Chaillot in Paris; the other was accompanist at the Théâtre Lyrique (the one who leads the singers' rehearsals at the piano). On Sundays he sat at the church organ, on weekdays in the theater's rehearsal room. He moved between several churches, but his work as an organist continued until 1871. The double post was a way to earn a living, and at the same time a period in which church music and stage music became second nature to him. (Lyrique) The Théâtre Lyrique was a house that eagerly staged new French opera. Gounod's Faust premiered there in 1859, and Bizet's Les pêcheurs de perles in 1863. Matching the score with the singers line by line, Delibes experienced at close range how music for the stage comes to completion. (Operetta) Around this time he wrote one light comic piece (operetta) after another. In 1856 he staged the one-act Deux sous de charbon at the Folies-Nouvelles, the theater run by Hervé, and that same year Deux vieilles gardes was well received at Offenbach's Bouffes-Parisiens. Over the next decade or so he brought a number of such small pieces to the stage. They did not bring great fame, but it was here that he honed his skill at sketching a character in melody within a brief scene. (The Opéra) In 1864 he moved to the Paris Opéra as second chorus master. Two years later the house divided the music for a new ballet, La Source, between him and Ludwig Minkus, a Vienna-born composer working in Russia. The second act and the opening scene of the third act that Delibes wrote were judged the fresher, and within the house he began to draw notice as a ballet composer.
III. Coppélia · 1866–1871 (age 30–35)
(Flowers) In 1867, as the Opéra revived his teacher Adam's ballet Le Corsaire, it asked Delibes for a new scene. The waltz he wrote, Pas des fleurs, was music added by the pupil to the work of a teacher who had died in 1856. (Coppélia) On May 25, 1870, Coppélia premiered. Taking E. T. A. Hoffmann's story 'The Sandman' as their starting point, Charles Nuitter and the choreographer Arthur Saint-Léon fashioned the libretto. It is the story of the young Franz, who loses his heart to Coppélia, an automaton made by the dollmaker Coppélius, and of his fiancée Swanilda, who wins him back by pretending to be the doll. The eeriness of the original was stripped away and turned into comedy. (Motifs) Delibes drove the story by repeating short melodies assigned to each character and scene — that is, leitmotifs. Also new was the way he brought folk dances such as the Hungarian csárdás and the Polish mazurka fully onto the ballet stage. The work showed that ballet music need not stop at accompanying the dance; it could carry the drama forward on its own. (War) The joy of success was brief. Two months later war broke out with Prussia, and Paris was besieged. In September Saint-Léon died, and in November Giuseppina Bozzacchi, the ballerina who had danced Swanilda, died of illness in the besieged city. It was the dancer's seventeenth birthday. In a single year he lost both of the people with whom he had made the work. (Marriage) In 1871 Delibes gave up both his post at the Opéra and his work as an organist. That same year he married Léontine Estelle Denain, daughter of the Comédie-Française actor Denain. With the success of Coppélia and the stability of married life, he was able for the first time to devote himself to composing without a second job. No record has been found of the couple having children.
A waltz added by the pupil when his teacher Adam's ballet was revived. Just before Coppélia, it shows in the briefest form what color Delibes's ballet melodies had.
- It was originally written for the scene in Le Corsaire in which the dancers form a flower garden. Over a waltz rhythm swaying three beats to the bar, the melody swells at length and then subsides.
- Ernő Dohnányi's dazzling arrangement of the piece for solo piano, the 'Naila waltz', is a beloved encore among pianists. Listen to the orchestral and piano versions side by side and you can hear how differently the same melody can shine.
- In the orchestral version, while the strings sing the main melody, listen for the short figures the woodwinds add like ornaments.
A comic ballet completed just before war and loss, it brought in leitmotifs and folk dances and raised ballet music to the role of the drama's protagonist. Knowing that he lost the two leads of the premiere that same year, you hear its brightness differently.
- The prelude opens with a slow, solemn melody in the horns, then soon turns to the vigorous rhythm of the mazurka, a Polish dance. Follow its distinctive accent, which falls not on the third beat but on the second.
- The csárdás (Hungarian dance) in Act I begins slow and heavy, then gathers speed until it rushes headlong. With each change of tempo, the mood on stage changes too.
- In Act II, the music for the scene in which Swanilda dances as if she were the doll Coppélia has a halting rhythm that sounds like the movements of a wind-up doll. The way it gradually loosens into a human dance is the wit of this ballet.
- In Act III, the 'Valse des heures' and the 'Prière' form a suite leading into the festival scene. Unlike the comedy before them, lyrical melodies unfold at length.
IV. Sylvia · 1871–1880 (age 35–44)
(Comic opera) In 1873 he staged his first full-scale opéra comique (French opera with spoken dialogue between the songs), Le roi l'a dit. A light comedy set at a seventeenth-century court, it was performed outside France as well. The work was the bridge by which he crossed from operetta composer to theater composer. (Cádiz) The following year he wrote the song Les filles de Cadix, setting a poem by Alfred de Musset. With its Spanish rhythms flowing as if in dance, the song soon became a favorite of sopranos. He caught the taste for things Spanish then spreading through Paris in a light, crisp melody. (Sylvia) In 1875 the newly opened opera house (the Palais Garnier) entrusted him with a major ballet. Sylvia, which premiered on June 14, 1876, borrowed its story from the Italian poet Tasso's pastoral drama Aminta. Its plot is the love between Sylvia, a huntress nymph in the service of the goddess Diana, and the shepherd Aminta. The music was highly praised, but opinions on the libretto, woven from mythological tales, were divided, and its early popularity fell short of Coppélia's. (Tchaikovsky) Musicians responded differently. Tchaikovsky, who heard Sylvia in Vienna in 1877, wrote in a letter to his friend and pupil Sergei Taneyev that had he known this music earlier, he would not have written Swan Lake. Tchaikovsky prized the elegance of Delibes's orchestration and the vitality of its rhythms, and Delibes's influence is often cited in discussions of the ballets Tchaikovsky wrote later. (Honors) In 1877 he was awarded the Légion d'honneur. In 1880 he staged the opera Jean de Nivelle, based on a medieval French legend, at the Opéra-Comique, where it ran for a steady number of performances. Having started out as a church accompanist, he was now a composer of standing recognized by the Parisian musical world.
A song written in the settled years after his marriage, as he was broadening his reach into opéra comique. It captures the Parisian taste for things Spanish in a light, witty melody.
- The piano accompaniment keeps up the rhythm of the bolero, a Spanish dance (three beats to the bar, with the first beat finely subdivided), to the very end. Listen to the rhythm of the accompaniment before the voice.
- Musset's poem tells of the girls of Cádiz who, on their way home from a bullfight, laugh off a man trying to buy their hearts with money. The refrain's 'Ah, la la' sounds like that laughter.
- The figures the voice rolls out rapidly in the refrain are a showcase for soprano virtuosity (coloratura), so each singer handles their speed and ornamentation differently.
A major work written for the new opera house; the libretto drew mixed reviews, but the music filled Tchaikovsky with admiration.
- Act I's 'Les chasseresses' begins with a hunting call on the horns. The brass paints the scene in which the huntress nymphs who serve the goddess Diana appear in the forest.
- Act III's 'Pizzicati' is played with a technique in which the strings pluck with the fingers instead of the bow (pizzicato). The short, clipped notes sound like Sylvia's nimble footwork, and it has become one of the best-known passages in all ballet music.
- Act III's 'Cortège de Bacchus' is a majestic march led by brass and percussion. Feel the weight of an orchestra that fills the stage of a great opera house.
- It was this orchestral color that Tchaikovsky admired. Listen to the waltz from his The Sleeping Beauty right after this ballet's waltz, and you can gauge the distance between the two composers.
V. Lakmé · 1880–1884 (age 44–48)
(Professor) In 1881 he was appointed professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire. A man who had built his career in operetta and theater rehearsal rooms now stood at the Conservatoire's composition podium. He held the post until his death. (Old dances) In 1882 the Comédie-Française revived Victor Hugo's play Le roi s'amuse. Banned immediately after its 1832 premiere, it was the very play from which Verdi's Rigoletto came. For this revival after fifty years, Delibes, who was in charge of the incidental music, wrote 'dances in the old style' modeled on sixteenth-century court dances. It was a matter of reweaving old forms in the orchestra of the nineteenth century. (Lakmé) On April 14, 1883, Lakmé premiered at the Opéra-Comique. Edmond Gondinet and Philippe Gille wrote the libretto, drawing on Pierre Loti's novel Le mariage de Loti. Set in India under British rule, it is the story of Lakmé, daughter of a Brahmin priest, and the British officer Gérald, who fall in love, until at last Lakmé dies after eating a poisoned flower. The title role was taken by the young American soprano Marie van Zandt. (The exotic) Paris at the time was deeply fascinated by the East and the colonies. Just as Bizet's Carmen had premiered at the same theater eight years earlier, Lakmé too depicted the love between a woman of a strange land and a foreign man. The India that Delibes painted was less real Indian music than the color of an East imagined by French audiences. The gentle ripples of the Flower Duet in Act I and the dazzling virtuosity of the Bell Song in Act II soon became the work's signature scenes. (Institut) Lakmé was a great success. The following year, in 1884, he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts of the Institut de France, succeeding Victor Massé. It was one of the highest honors a French musician could receive.
Incidental music for a revival of Hugo's play, the source of Verdi's Rigoletto, in which 16th-century court dances are brought back to life in 19th-century orchestral dress.
- The galliard is a vigorous, leaping court dance in triple time. Its springing rhythm calls to mind the court balls of old.
- The pavane is a slow, stately processional dance with 2 beats to the bar. Unfamiliar harmonies that seem to echo the old church modes lend it the color of a bygone age.
- In the brisk passepied, with 3 beats to the bar, listen for the light conversation passed back and forth among the woodwinds.
- This way of reweaving old dances for the modern orchestra is worth hearing alongside the work of the next generation of French composers.
Sung in Act 1 as Lakmé sets out for the river with her servant Mallika to gather flowers, it holds the stillness before the tragedy begins.
- As the words "beneath the dense dome of the forest" suggest, this is the scene in which two women glide by boat toward a riverbank in bloom. The accompaniment of harp and strings ripples like the water.
- The beauty of this song lies in the way the two voices flow side by side in parallel 3rds·6ths (intervals that sound sweetly together), then cross and answer one another.
- Used in airline commercials and films in the late 20th century, it became a melody familiar even to people who know nothing of opera. Heard in its place within the opera, it stands in vivid contrast to the tragedy that follows.
In Act 2, a father makes his daughter sing in the marketplace so that her voice will lure out a British officer. At the moment love becomes a trap, the opera places its most dazzling song.
- At the opening, the soprano sings a long, unaccompanied, wordless vowel, "Ah—." It is a moment when the whole theater holds its breath.
- The song tells the legend of a pariah's daughter who saved a traveler lost in the forest with the sound of her bells. Listen for the passages where the voice imitates the bells in short, bouncing notes (staccato).
- The high mi (E) that soars at the very end is held to be a touchstone for coloratura sopranos. Compare the recordings of Lily Pons, Joan Sutherland and Natalie Dessay, and you will hear how differently the same score can be interpreted.
VI. The unfinished Kassya · 1884–1891 (age 48–55)
(Kassya) After Lakmé, he threw himself into a new opera, Kassya. Based on a story by the Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, it was set in Galicia, in Eastern Europe. He revised it painstakingly again and again, and the work remained unfinished as the years went by. All the while, he kept his teaching post at the Conservatoire. (Character) His contemporaries remembered him as a gentle, sociable man. The clear, graceful character of his music, and his way of painting a scene through melody and orchestral color without exaggeration, suit that impression well. (Death) On January 16, 1891, he died suddenly in Paris at the age of fifty-four. Kassya was left unfinished. He was buried in the Montmartre Cemetery. (Massenet) His fellow composer Jules Massenet took charge of the remaining score, putting it in order and completing the orchestration. Kassya premiered at the Opéra-Comique in 1893 but did not hold the stage for long. Instead, the two ballets Coppélia and Sylvia, together with the opera Lakmé, are still performed in theaters around the world. (Legacy) Before he came along, French ballet music was often regarded as mere accompaniment to support the dancers. He brought to ballet a symphonic level of orchestral writing and a dramatic structure built on leitmotifs, and that current flowed through Tchaikovsky into the ballet music that followed. The years spent as a boy at the cathedral organ and as an accompanist in the theater rehearsal room were the foundation of those works.
Lesser-known stories
(Breeches role) At the 1870 premiere of Coppélia, the young Frantz was danced not by a man but by a woman, Eugénie Fiocre, en travesti. In the mid-19th century the Paris Opéra was a stage centered on the ballerina, and male dancers had little standing, so such casting was not unusual. At the Paris Opéra, the custom of having a woman dance Frantz lasted until the mid-20th century. Today Frantz is naturally a role for a male dancer, and the fact is mentioned only now and then in program notes. (Naïla) The piece commonly called the "Naïla Waltz" does not come from La Source at all, but is the "Pas des fleurs" written in 1867 for a revival of Adam's Le Corsaire. Naïla is the name of the heroine of La Source, and just how the music of the two works came to be gathered under one name has never been clearly established. As Dohnányi's piano arrangement spread widely under this name, it stuck, and remains so to this day. Music written for one ballet but called by the name of another is a trace of the 19th-century theatrical practice of frequently adding and cutting scenes. (A thousand) For nearly half a century after its premiere, Lakmé was a signature work of the Opéra-Comique repertoire, and in 1931 it reached its thousandth performance at the theater. Performances dwindled for a time after that, but in the late 20th century, as the "Flower Duet" appeared in one commercial and film after another, the work as a whole drew renewed attention. Today, many who know the melody listen without realizing it is a scene from a tragic opera.
Glossary notes 📚🔎
Ballet
(Etymology) The Italian balletto ('little dance'), from ballare ('to dance'), crossed into France and became ballet. (In music) A performance that tells a story through dance, music and staging alone, without spoken words or singing. The music gives the dancers' movements their beat while also speaking for the characters' feelings and the mood of each scene. Watch a cartoon with the sound off and you can still follow the plot, but the tension disappears; ballet music, in effect, takes on both the soundtrack and the dialogue at once. Delibes is counted among the composers who made this music capable of leading the story rather than merely accompanying it.
Operetta
(Etymology) The Italian opera with the diminutive ending -etta attached, meaning 'little opera.' (In music) A short opera that mixes songs with spoken dialogue and has a light, comic plot. Offenbach and Hervé made it fashionable in Paris in the mid-19th century. Think of classmates at a school festival putting on a short skit with songs mixed in. In his youth Delibes wrote a number of such works, learning his craft as a composer for the stage.
Opéra comique
(Etymology) In French it means 'comic opera,' but despite the name, the content is not necessarily funny. (In music) A French style of opera in which spoken dialogue comes between the musical numbers. The name arose to distinguish it from grand opera, which is sung from beginning to end, so tragedies in which the protagonist dies, such as Carmen and Lakmé, are also classed as opéras comiques. It resembles the way actors in a musical trade lines of dialogue and then slip into song. The term also refers to the Paris theater of the same name (the Opéra-Comique).
Leitmotif (Leitmotiv)
(Etymology) The German Leitmotiv means 'leading (leit) motive (Motiv)'—a short musical fragment that leads the story. (In music) A technique in which a short melody is attached to a particular character, object or idea, and is heard again each time that element appears. It became famous through Wagner's operas, and Delibes brought it into ballet. It is like a film in which the same music always plays just before the villain appears, so you know who is coming before you see the screen. (Elsewhere) In everyday use, it also refers to a dominant theme that recurs in a work or in a person's life.
Mazurka
(Etymology) The name comes from a word for the people of Poland's Mazowsze (Mazovia) region. (In music) A Polish folk dance with three beats to the bar, but unlike the waltz, the accent often falls not on the first beat but on the second or third. This gives it a distinctive lilt, as if stamping the feet. It is like jumping rope and deliberately pushing your effort one beat later, so the rhythm changes. Mazurkas appear in the prelude and Act 1 of Coppélia, and the form is also widely known through Chopin's piano pieces.
Pizzicato
(Etymology) From the Italian pizzicare ('to pinch'), meaning to pluck a string as if pinching it. (In music) A technique of playing a string instrument such as the violin or cello by plucking the strings with the fingers instead of drawing the bow across them. The sound is short and crisp, and it does not ring for long. Think of the short sound a rubber band makes when you flick it with your finger. The "Pizzicati" in Act 3 of Sylvia is a famous example of an entire piece built on this technique.
Coloratura
(Etymology) From the Italian colorare ('to color'), meaning to give color to a melody. (In music) A vocal technique rich in brilliant ornamentation, such as rapid runs, soaring high notes and short, bouncing notes. A high soprano who excels at such singing is called a coloratura soprano. Like clearing the fastest, hardest stretch of a rhythm game without a single miss, it demands both precision and brilliance. The "Bell Song" from Lakmé is a classic test piece.