Léo Delibes
After composing light comic opérettes in the 1850s and 1860s, while also serving as a church organist, Delibes achieved public recognition for his music for the ballet La Source in 1866.
Delibes was born in Saint-Germain-du-Val, now part of La Flèche (Sarthe), on 21 February 1836;[1] his father worked for the French postal service and his mother was a talented amateur musician, the daughter of an opera singer and niece of the organist Édouard Batiste.
[3][4] As a boy, Delibes had an unusually fine singing voice;[3] he was a chorister at the church of La Madeleine and sang in the première of Meyerbeer's Le prophète at the Paris Opéra in 1849.
[2] In 1856 Delibes' first stage work was premiered at the Folies-Nouvelles: Deux sous de charbon (Two sous-worth of coal), a one-act comic piece to a libretto by Jules Moinaux, described as an "asphyxie lyrique".
Many were written for the Bouffes-Parisiens, the theatre run by Jacques Offenbach, including Deux vieilles gardes ("Two Old Guards"), Delibes's second opera, which enjoyed enormous success, attributable in Macdonald's view to the composer's gift for "witty melody and lightness of touch".
[3] In the view of the musicologist and critic Adolphe Jullien, Delibes "displayed such a wealth of melody as a composer of ballet music" that Minkus was "completely eclipsed".
Le Figaro thought the libretto weak, but praised Delibes' music: "his melodic vein, his impeccable taste, his scenic skill, his beautiful humour saved a work which, without him, would have gone unnoticed".
[3] Despite the success of his two ballets, Delibes was still anxious to write a serious vocal work, and composed a grand scena, La Mort d'Orphée (The Death of Orpheus), given at the Trocadéro Concerts in 1878 during the Exposition Universelle.
[19] Macdonald writes: Its success was lasting; the oriental colour, the superb part for the title role, a well-constructed libretto and the real charm of the music, all contributed to a work on which, with the ballets, Delibes' fame has rested.
The more serious Jean de Nivelle, one of the works showing the influence of Meyerbeer and Lalo, is generally weightier in tone, with some lapses into the composer's lighter style in such pieces as the Act III couplets, "Moi!
[2] The chorus "Nous sommes les reines d'un jour" in the Act I finale continually switches between 24 and 34 with what Macdonald calls "a modal melody of striking originality".
[2] Lakmé – which Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians ranks as Delibes' masterpiece, even above Coppelia and Sylvia – shows the influence of Bizet, with echoes of Carmen and Les pêcheurs de perles in the harmonic techniques and subtleties of orchestration.
[33] Macdonald finds points to praise: the oriental inflections in the music, the vocal writing, and the "fine close to the first scene of Act 3, with snow falling on the deserted stage".
[34] Delibes greatly enlarged on Adam's modest use of leitmotifs: each leading character is accompanied by music that portrays him or her; Noël Goodwin describes them: "Swanilda in her entry waltz, bright and graceful; Dr. Coppélius in stiff, dry counterpoint, the canonic device ingeniously applied also to Coppélia, the doll he has created; Franz in two themes, each sharing the same melodic shape of the first four notes, but the second having a more sentimental feeling than the sprightly first theme".
[35] Delibes made extensive use of characteristic national dances, including the bolero, czardas, jig and mazurka, continually interspersed with waltz rhythms.
In Van Vechten's view, Delibes revolutionised ballet music by introducing in his scores "a symphonic element, a wealth of graceful melody, and a richness of harmonic fibre, based, it is safe to hazard, on a healthy distaste for routine".
[35] The pianist and musical scholar Graham Johnson quotes the musicologist Fritz Noske's view that Delibes' songs derive from the chansonnette, "lighter and more entertaining than the romance, and less susceptible to the German influence of the lied".
In his songs, Delibes shares with Bizet "a natural feeling for the theatre, and an ability to spin local colour", as in his chanson espagnole "Les filles de Cadix".
He brackets Delibes with his junior contemporary Reynaldo Hahn as songwriters – "charmers both [with] a similarly eighteenth-century idea of the role of music in refined society: the unashamed giving of pleasure".
