THE FRENCH PIANIST Léon Delafosse was an over-achiever in his youth. By age 22 he had won first prize in piano at the Paris Conservatoire (at just thirteen), become a close friend of author Marcel Proust and the protégé and probable lover of the famous dandy-poet Count Robert de Montesquiou, had his portrait painted by his friend John Singer Sargent, played the world premieres of three major piano works by Gabriel Fauré, and performed with the great Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe and the actress Sarah Bernhardt.
Born in Paris on January 4, 1874, Delafosse was raised in humble surroundings. His father was a bookkeeper and his mother a piano teacher. She must have been a fine instructor, for Léon was admitted to the Paris Conservatory at age nine to study with Antoine Marmontel, the teacher of Claude Debussy. Shortly after graduation, Delafosse played in several concerts, leading one critic to declare him the equal of great Polish virtuoso Ignacy Jan Paderewski. His first appearance with an orchestra was in January 1890, when he played Carl Maria von Weber’s Konzertstück with the Colonne Orchestra at the Théâtre du Châtelet, at the time the largest concert hall in Paris. The following month he played concertos by Mozart and Mendelssohn, after which a critic wrote: “He has ascended to the top rank of French virtuosos.”
Proust biographer George Painter described Delafosse as “a thin, vain, ambitious, blond young man, with icy blue eyes and diaphanously pale, supernaturally beautiful features.” Proust aptly nicknamed him “the Angel.” The two met in February 1894 when the 28-year-old Proust heard the twenty-year-old pianist perform at a salon concert. They became fast friends, for they had similar aspirations: Proust wanted to gain entrée to high social circles in order to write about them, and Delafosse was looking for a patron to help launch his concert career. Their goals were achieved through Count Robert de Montesquiou, a 38-year-old poet who was gay, rich, witty, and flamboyant—a kind of French Oscar Wilde. Soon Proust and Delafosse were in the count’s circle, and the latter had a patron. The relationship, which may also have been sexual, lasted from 1894 to ’97, with the count organizing and financing Delafosse’s performances in the major concert halls of Paris and London, as well as at private events held in exclusive Parisian salons.
The first such event was Delafosse’s recital debut in Paris, on April 20, 1894, at the Salle Érard, a favored venue of leading performers. The program included major works by Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt. A large audience attended and a critic praised the pianist’s “simplicity, charm, elegance, and distinction.” The following month he performed again at the Salle Érard, playing Henri de Saussine’s Fantaisie on Montesquiou’s poems Les Chauves-souris (“The Bats”). A few days later, he played a salon performance of his own recent song cycle on Les Chauves-souris.
An equally important event occurred on May 30, when Delafosse took part in a glamorous musical and literary “festival” held outdoors at the count’s newly opened Pavillon Montesquiou at Versailles. The cream of Parisian society attended, including the countesses Greffulhe, Potocka, and Portalès; Count Boni de Castellane; the Prince de Sagan; and other luminaries. Sarah Bernhardt and several other actors recited poetry by André Chénier, Paul Verlaine, François Coppée, and Montesquiou. But the focus of the event was Delafosse, who performed Bach, Chopin, and Anton Rubinstein at the beginning of the program, accompanied his own six songs on Les Chauves-souris (sung by the noted tenor Maurice Bagès), and closed the event with a Hungarian Rhapsody by Liszt. Proust wrote two reviews for the newspapers, describing in detail the program and the great personages present.
Delafosse’s other important performances during these “Montesquiou years” included the world premieres of Fauré’s Thème et variations, Fifth Barcarolle, and Fourth Valse-caprice. On December 10, 1896, at St. James’s Hall in London, he premiered his own transcription for two pianos of the Second and Fourth Valses-caprices, with Fauré playing the second piano. Also in London around this time, he performed two recitals with the violinist Eugène Ysaÿe and again played Weber’s Konzertstück.
In late 1896, Montesquiou wrote a long essay on music titled “Table d’harmonie,” which he dedicated to Delafosse. And around this time, the pianist composed a cycle of songs to poems by Montesquiou called Quintette de fleurs (“Quintet of Flowers”). The pianist’s last recital as Montesquiou’s protégé was at the salon of Baroness Adolphe de Rothschild in June 1897.
The breakup of the relationship took place that summer. Montesquiou maintained that Delafosse was ungrateful and had become too much of a careerist, seeking opportunities from other potential patrons. Jealous and vengeful, he tried to have Delafosse ostracized from their social circles. Later he wrote an article titled “L’Enfant gâté” (“The Spoiled Child”), which alludes to “an ungrateful pianist,” and a posthumously published essay satirizing Delafosse’s personality. Proust took Montesquiou’s side and later used Delafosse as one of several models for the musician Charles Morel in his great novel À la recherche du temps perdu. Morel, a lover of the Baron de Charlus (a character modeled on Montesquiou), is shown as a cynical opportunist trying to make his way in an aristocratic world.
By the time of the breakup Delafosse had begun playing in the salon of Mme. Anatole Bartholoni, wife of a rich financier. He especially enjoyed the company of her daughter Jeanne, who was a forty-year-old spinster, a fine equestrienne, and a former lover of the Princess de Polignac. Eventually Jeanne became his muse, and although the relationship was not amorous, her financial and moral support replaced what he had enjoyed with Montesquiou. Their bond lasted until her death fifty years later.
Musical highlights around 1900 included performances in Paris, Vienna, Dresden, Monte Carlo, and Italy. In March 1903 he played Liszt’s First Concerto in Paris and was praised in Le Gaulois for his “astonishing virtuosity, grace, and expression.” Although he disliked touring, he went as far as Constantinople, where seven ambassadors attended his highly successful recital. In London in February 1906, he “exhibited an incredible level of virtuosity,” playing Weber, Liszt, and his own Fantaisie for piano and orchestra. Also in London, he accompanied the tenor Enrico Caruso at a benefit concert. He was considered important enough to make a number of piano-roll recordings around 1906, alongside the great figures of Alfred Cortot, Wilhelm Backhaus, and Ferruccio Busoni. (Some of Delafosse’s recordings can be heard on YouTube, including an exciting account of Percy Grainger’s paraphrase of Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers” from The Nutcracker, with virtuosic showers of notes alternating with stylish lyrical passages.)
Planned tours of the U.S. and Russia were aborted, and in 1909, in Brussels, he received one of his worst reviews: “A profusion of affected gestures did not replace emotion and a true and honest interpretation. He falsified the works of great composers in a deplorable way.”
The First World War brought the Belle Époque to an end. With musical activity in Paris much diminished, Delafosse spent the war years composing and learning new repertoire. At some point before Debussy’s death in 1918, he played a few of the composer’s pieces for him. Afterward, Debussy replied that although he had conceived them differently, Delafosse should not change his interpretations. One of his first post-war appearances was in a concert dedicated to Debussy’s memory, held at the Geneva Casino in April 1918. He played for the first time five Debussy pieces, and in a concert in February the following year he included nine of them.
In 1919, he published a long essay called “Le Piano dans l’Art,” summarizing his musical views. Revised and republished in 1928, it undoubtedly reflected his response to certain criticisms of his style of playing. The essay emphasized the role of an interpreter’s personality, which he deemed as important as faithfulness to the composer’s text. The language is flowery and the concepts are quite old-fashioned, including the notion that modern composers—“except for Debussy and Ravel”—are out of touch with performers and that they “haven’t understood what the piano can do.”
By the 1920s, Delafosse’s style, both as a composer and a performer, was becoming outmoded. He seems to have realized this, gradually allowing his public career to fade. There were, however, some exceptional occasions, including a concert in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on June 26, 1922, that featured his performance of Chopin’s Andante spianato et grande polonaise brillante, a Bach concerto, and his own Konzertstück, all with the Paris Conservatory Orchestra. A very elite public attended this state-financed event, including officials and members of the aristocracy.
On May 18, 1922, Delafosse attended an elaborate private dinner at the Hotel Majestic in Paris honoring Proust and Sergei Diaghilev after the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Renard. The guests included Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, Sergei Diaghilev, James Joyce, Proust, and—as a friend of the hosts—Delafosse. Proust died six months later.
Delafosse received one of his best reviews in Le Figaro in June 1925:
M. Delafosse has rightly been called “a magician of sound.” His playing is clear, measured, colorful, free of emphasis and caprice, and exquisitely light. His Chopin was touching, his Liszt brilliant, and his Debussy and Saint-Saëns tasteful and full of life. He also played his own Les Tableaux du rêve [“Dream Paintings”], twenty short pieces that reveal secrets of harmonic expression, mysterious, vigorous, sober, and melancholic. They contain infinite personal colors and they were played with absolute mastery.
In March 1928, Le Figaro announced a sensational “Festival Léon Delafosse,” to be held on the stage of the Paris Opéra. He had hoped to re-enter the concert scene in grand style, but financing fell through and the event had to be canceled. This marked the definitive end of his public career. However, numerous salon concerts followed in Paris and Switzerland, including one attended by Debussy’s widow. Most of these were organized and financed by Jeanne Bartholoni, with whom he lived near Lausanne. His Swiss publisher, Henn, continued to issue his compositions throughout the 1930s. (Some of these may be heard on YouTube, including a recent live performance of Les Chauves-souris.) In 1940, Delafosse and Jeanne moved to Monte Carlo. There they had a small circle of friends for whom he would play when asked. A friend wrote after one such occasion in 1947: “Léon Delafosse is still an extraordinary pianist.”
Jeanne died in February 1945, and Delafosse followed on August 4, 1951. He is buried in the Cemetery of Monaco, where his illustrious neighbors include Josephine Baker, Roger Moore, Anthony Burgess, and the composer Cécile Chaminade, whose music he had performed regularly. Although he and his compositions are little remembered today, the colorful career of Léon Delafosse provides a unique window onto a remarkable period of French musical history and taste.
Charles Timbrell, a pianist and author of French Pianism (1999), is professor emeritus of music at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
