Leo Delibes was a French composer renowned for his operas and ballets. He was born in 1836 at St-Germain-du-Val in northwest France and studied in Paris under Adolphe Adam and others, becoming an accompanist at the Théâtre-Lyriques in 1853, for whom he composed his first opera, Maître Griffard, in 1857.
In 1863 he became an accompanist, and later second chorus-master,
at the Paris Opéra. His attention turned to ballet and he won fame with
his ballets Sylvia and Coppélia.
However, opera drew him back and he wrote three for the Opéra-Comique,
the most famous of them being Lakmé in 1883.
This opera was in keeping with the current vogue for the “mysterious
east”, which was also an Opéra-Comique tradition. Delibes embellished his tale
of a love affair between an English lieutenant and the title character, an
Indian girl, with a wealth of mock-Oriental melody.
One admirer of Delibes’s tunefulness and decorative scoring,
both in his operas and ballets, was Tchaikovsky, who preferred his music of that
of both Brahms and Wagner.
Leo Delibes died in Paris in 1891 at the age of 54.
