The actress and musician Madeleine Milhaud was famed in Parisian circles for her fashionable “salons”, brilliant gatherings of modernist authors, painters, dancers and musicians.
Jean Cocteau, Igor Stravinsky, Fernand L?ger, Andr? Gide, Paul Claudel, and Erik Satie were regular fixtures, and Pablo Picasso and the ballet impresario Diaghilev would occasionally make an appearance. Milhaud was thus one of a dying breed - the French Society hostess, who would regularly provide the setting for a vibrant interchange of philosophical and artistic ideas and initiatives.
She acquired this role through marrying at the age of 23 her first cousin, the composer Darius Milhaud. It was the start of a happy 49-year marriage, in which Milhaud encouraged his wife’s career. He was one Les Six, a group of French musicians whose most famous member was Francis Poulenc.
Milhaud experimented with South American rhythms and jazz. His friends would frequently collaborate with opera and theatre productions. Madeleine had a key role as a muse and Milhaud dedicated his piano suite La Muse M?nagère (the Household Muse) to her. She had chosen the title herself and she later wrote the libretti for two of his operas, M?d?e and Bolivar.
Intelligent and multi-talented, Madeleine was one of the first actresses to act in front of a radio microphone rather than a visible audience. She specialised in poetry, and her study of music was a good preparation for speaking roles in musical works, such as Joan of Arc in Arthur Honegger’s oratorio Jeanne d’Arc au bûche.
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When the Germans invaded Paris in 1940, Milhaud knew that as a prominent Jewish intellectual he was likely to be arrested, so fled with the family to Californi. A deep attachment to Europe meant they returned to Paris after the liberation - although Milhaud continued to teach annual composition courses in California until shortly before his death in 1974.
Madeleine devoted the next quarter century, until she was well into her nineties, to promoting Milhaud’s work and his place in the canon of European music. She established archives, collections of photographs, rummaged through and classified his papers and 400 compositions. And she was ever ready to advise musicians on the interpretation of his works.
To celebrate her own centenary in 2002 she co-authored and published a book about her life and by now legendary circle of friends titled Mon XXème Siècle,
At her wish she was buried next to Darius in his birthplace of Aix-en-Provence. She is survived by their only child, the painter and sculptor Daniel Milhaud.
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Madeleine Milhaud, actress, musician and legendary hostess, was born on March 22, 1902. She died on January 17, 2008, aged 105