Editing Léo Delibes (section)

===Early years===

Delibes was born in Saint-Germain-du-Val, now part of [[La Flèche]] ([[Sarthe]]), on 21 February 1836;<ref>Curzon, p. 7</ref> 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]].<ref name=grove>Macdonald, Hugh. [https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-000000746 "Delibes, (Clément Philibert) Léo"], ''Grove Music Online'', Oxford University Press, 2001. Retrieved 12 January 2020</ref> Delibes was the couple's only child. His father died in 1847 and the family moved to Paris, where soon after his twelfth birthday Delibes was admitted to the [[Paris Conservatoire]].<ref name=f>Darcours, Charles. "Léo Delibes", ''Le Figaro'', 17 January 1891, p. 1 (in French)</ref> He studied first with Antoine-Jules Tariot (music theory), and then with [[Félix Le Couppey]] (piano), [[François Benoist]] (organ), [[François Bazin (composer)|François Bazin]] (harmony) and, at eighteen, [[Adolphe Adam]] (composition).<ref name=f/><ref name=c9>Curzon, p. 9</ref>

As a boy, Delibes had an unusually fine singing voice;<ref name=f/> he was a chorister at the church of [[La Madeleine, Paris|La Madeleine]] and sang in the première of [[Giacomo Meyerbeer|Meyerbeer's]] ''[[Le prophète]]'' at the [[Paris Opéra]] in 1849.<ref name=c9/> While still a student Delibes became organist of {{Interlanguage link|St. Pierre de Chaillot|fr|3=Église Saint-Pierre-de-Chaillot}} and accompanist at the [[Théâtre Lyrique]].<ref name=grove/><ref name=c9/> At the latter he took part in the preparation of most of the operas in the theatre's repertoire, including classics such as ''[[The Marriage of Figaro]]'' and ''[[Fidelio]]'' and new works such as [[Louis Clapisson]]'s ''La Fanchonnette'', [[Victor Massé]]'s ''La Reine Topaze'' and [[Charles Gounod|Gounod's]] ''[[Faust (opera)|Faust]]''.<ref name=f/>{{refn|Delibes made the piano reduction of the orchestra part for the vocal score of [[Charles Gounod|Gounod]]'s ''[[Faust (opera)|Faust]]'' in 1859.<ref>Giroud, p. 266</ref> A theory put forward in 1991 that Delibes wrote the ballet music for the opera when it was revised in 1869<ref>Johnson, E. "Gounod or Delibes? – authorship of the ballet music in Faust", ''Opera'', March 1991, p. 276</ref> has not been supported in subsequent studies of Gounod by Yves Bruley (2015) and Vincent Giroud (2019).<ref>Bruley, pp. 170–176; and Giroud, p. 270</ref>|group=n}} His biographer [[Hugh Macdonald (musicologist)|Hugh Macdonald]] writes that although Delibes remained a church organist until 1871 (he held several posts, the last of them at the church of Saint Jean-Saint François from 1862), he was "clearly drawn more to the theatre [and] found his métier at [[Hervé (composer)|Hervé]]'s highly successful [[Folies-Nouvelles]]".<ref name=grove/>