DELIBES

LÉO DELIBES

(1898–1937)

London Philharmonic Orchestra – Suite from ‘Sylvia’

Congress Theatre, Eastbourne, 1997

In his time, no less a personage than Tchaikovsky thought Delibes a better composer than the current big guns from Germany, Brahms and Wagner. Referring to the three-act ballet Sylvia, he even went so far as to declare his own work Swan Lake was “poor stuff” in comparison. Certainly Tchaikovsky could afford to be generous, but Delibes at his best produced memorable melodies and orchestration of a texture to rival the Russian giant, and if Tchaikovsky can be said to have rescued ballet music from its lowly position in the east, then it was Delibes who performed the same service for it in France.

Born at St Germain du Val in 1836, Clément Philibert Léo Delibes was a chorister and organist from an early age. He studied under Adolphe Adam (the composer of Giselle) at the Paris Conservatoire where he was later appointed Professor of Composition, after also having been second chorus master at the Paris Opéra.

When he was 17, Adam secured for him the post of repetiteur at the Théâtre Lyrique, and the experience inspired Delibes to compose over a dozen operettas in as many years, most of which were seen at the Bouffes-Parisiens. The turning point came when the two acts he contributed to the ballet La Source were so successful that they later appeared on their own under the title Naïla. He was immediately invited to compose a complete original ballet and the result, Coppélia (1870), established him as a major talent overnight.

Of Delibes’s later works, the best known are the operas Le Roi l’a Dit (1873) and Lakmé (1883). This latter is perhaps best known for its famous ‘Bell Song’, and rather less for its setting, a fanciful India in the period of the Raj, which merely pays lip service to the contemporary taste for exotica. In the last few years music from Lakmé has been heard in living rooms up and down the land accompanying the British Airways commercials on TV.

The ballet Sylvia, about the mythological huntress Diana, with choreography by Merante, was a more ambitious work than Coppélia and was even regarded by some critics at the time as rather too symphonic in its ambition and scope. The suite derived from the score, however, has remained a favourite of the concert hall ever since, and reflects all that is most distinctive in Delibes’s music. The ballet received its premiere at the Théâtre National in Paris on 14 June 1876.