Madeleine Milhaud

Origins and early life

Madeleine Milhaud was born in the ninth arrondissement of Paris on 22 March 1902 and died in the eighteenth on 17 January 2008, at a hundred and five.

Work and career

She was at once the first cousin and the wife of the composer Darius Milhaud, whom she married in 1925; they came from the same Jewish family of Aix-en-Provence, of the old Comtadin community that is the longest continuous Jewish presence in France, and Darius described himself all his life as a Provençal Jew. Her father was from Aix, her mother from Brussels. She trained as an actress with Charles Dullin, performed in the theatre, and then made her life's work of her husband's music: she wrote the libretti of his operas Médée, Bolivar and La Mère coupable, and he dedicated to her the piano suite La Muse ménagère, a portrait of their days together.

In 1940 the couple left France for the United States, where Darius taught at Mills College in California; the Jewish laws of Vichy had made staying impossible.

Later years

After his death in 1974 she spent more than thirty years as the guardian of his work, teaching, recording, correcting and giving interviews on him almost to the end of her long life. Their son Daniel became a painter and sculptor.