Maurice Delage (1879-1961)

Like his musical output, Maurice Delage’s writings are few in number. Even so, they form an interesting corpus, dominated by a correspondence of some sixty letters with artists of the highest importance—including Georges Auric, Léon Bakst, Lili Boulanger, René Chalupt, Marya Freund, Jacques Ibert, Darius Milhaud, Roland-Manuel, Igor Stravinsky, and Ricardo Vines. Delage’s main correspondent, however, was Maurice Ravel, having been one of his only composition students, and one of his closest friends since they met in the group des “Apaches” in the early 1900s. The 60-odd letters that have been preserved shed light on Delage’s point of view regarding the development of aesthetic tendencies in French music in the first half of the twentieth century.