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Remembering Georges Delerue, 1925-1992
Composer Georges Delerue died ten years ago today, on March 20, 1992. He had a stroke, just hours after recording the last cue for the soundtrack to his last film, Rich in Love, and died two days later. He was 67.
Georges Henri Jean-Baptiste Delerue was born in Roubaix, France, in March 1925. A clarinet and piano player as a child, Delerue attended the Turgot Institute, the Roubaix conservatory, and the Conservatoire de Paris, where he studied composition with Darius Milhaud and Henri Büsser. His friends there included Maurice Jarre and Pierre Boulez, and together the three of them would make often make money on the side performing jazz in piano bars near the Paris Opera House.
He began writing stage music during the late 1940s, for the Théâtre National Populaire, the Comédie-Française, and the Théâtre Babylone, before being hired to direct the orchestra of the Club d’Essai for French National Radio and Television. His work for FRNT led directly to him scoring his first major project, television drama, Princes du Sang, in 1952. Read more…