Claire Delbos

About Claire Delbos

Claire Delbos (1906–1959) was a French violinist and composer, and the first wife of Olivier Messiaen, a partnership that placed her own creative career in the shadow of her husband's more celebrated one. Born in Paris to Victor Delbos, a professor at the Sorbonne, she trained as a violinist and composer at the Schola Cantorum and the Paris Conservatoire, and in the early 1930s she gave recitals together with Messiaen before their marriage in 1932. Messiaen dedicated his Thème et variations for violin and piano to her as a wedding gift, and the couple's early years together were marked by the birth of their son Pascal in 1937 as well as several earlier miscarriages. 

As a composer, Delbos produced songs, vocal works, and organ pieces, among them Paraphrase sur le jugement dernier (1939) and L'offrande à Marie (1943). Her later life was overshadowed by illness: a hysterectomy in 1949 led to a cerebral infection that left her with lasting amnesia, and she spent her final years in a sanatorium, in declining health, until her death in 1959. Though her compositional output was constrained by these circumstances, Delbos remains a notable figure in French musical life of the interwar period, remembered both for her own works and for her place alongside Messiaen in the Paris musical world of the 1930s.