At a time when ballet music was treated as little more than dancing fodder, Delibes put the theatre orchestra firmly in the spotlight with a winning combination of melodic enchantment and rhythmic exhilaration. Such was his impact that ballet supremo Tchaikovsky considered Delibes a finer composer than Wagner. Born in Saint-Germain-du Val, France, in 1836, he was admitted aged 12 to the Paris Conservatory, where his teachers included leading ballet and light-opera composer Adolphe Adam. Delibes cut his creative teeth on a series of comic operas, but the turning point came when he was invited to contribute two acts of ballet music to La Source (1866), the rest being written by Ludwig Minkus. So evident was Delibes’ flair for character dance music that he was invited to produce two full-length ballet scores that became instant classics: Coppélia (1870) and Sylvia (1876). Yet he always considered himself principally a vocal composer, and following several near misses, hit the jackpot with his exotic, India-based opera Lakmé (1883), with its indelible “Flower Duet”. He died in 1891, aged 54.