Eraïm-Miriam Delaborde, generally known as Élie-Miriam Delaborde (7 February 18399 December 1913) was a French pianist and composer. He was also renowned as a player of the pedal piano.

His birth was registered under the name of his mother Lina Eraïm Miriam, aged 38, of Nantes

Nantes

Nantes is a city in western France, located on the Loire River, from the Atlantic coast. The city is the 6th largest in France, while its metropolitan area ranks 8th with over 800,000 inhabitants....

, and an unnamed father. Delaborde was generally believed to be the illegitimate son of the composer and pianist Charles-Valentin Alkan

Charles-Valentin Alkan

Charles-Valentin Alkan was a French composer and one of the greatest virtuoso pianists of his day. His attachment to his Jewish origins is displayed both in his life and his work. He entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of six, earning many awards, and as an adult became a famous virtuoso...

 and one of his high-class married pupils. Delaborde was the maiden name of the mother of George Sand

George Sand

Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, later Baroness Dudevant , best known by her pseudonym George Sand , was a French novelist and memoirist.-Life:...

, writer and sometime lover of Alkan's friend Frédéric Chopin

Frédéric Chopin

Frédéric François Chopin was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist. He is considered one of the great masters of Romantic music and has been called "the poet of the piano"....

, and some people have seen some significance in this. Alkan's withdrawal from public life coincided with the birth and upbringing of Delaborde. According to his friend, the pianist Isidor Philipp

Isidor Philipp

Isidor Philipp was a French pianist, composer, and distinguished pedagogue of Hungarian descent. He was born in Budapest and died in Paris.-Biography:...

, Delaborde detested his father.

He was a pupil of Alkan, Ignaz Moscheles

Ignaz Moscheles

Ignaz Moscheles was a Bohemian composer and piano virtuoso, whose career after his early years was based initially in London, and later at Leipzig, where he succeeded his friend and sometime pupil Felix Mendelssohn as head of the Conservatoire.-Sources:Much of what we know about Moscheles's life...

 and Adolf von Henselt

Adolf von Henselt

Adolf von Henselt was a German composer and pianist.-Life:Henselt was born at Schwabach, in Bavaria. At the age of three he began to learn the violin, and at five the piano under Frau von Fladt...

. He made successful tours of England, Germany and Russia, and travelled with Henri Vieuxtemps

Henri Vieuxtemps

Henri François Joseph Vieuxtemps was a Belgian composer and violinist. He occupies an important place in the history of the violin as a prominent exponent of the Franco-Belgian violin school during the mid-19th century....

 and Henryk Wieniawski

Henryk Wieniawski

Henryk Wieniawski was a Polish violinist and composer.-Biography:Henryk Wieniawski was born in Lublin, Congress Poland, Russian Empire. His father, Tobiasz Pietruszka, had converted to Catholicism. His talent for playing the violin was recognized early, and in 1843 he entered the Paris...

. He seemed to share his supposed father's eccentricities: during the Franco-Prussian War

Franco-Prussian War

The Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War, often referred to in France as the 1870 War was a conflict between the Second French Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia. Prussia was aided by the North German Confederation, of which it was a member, and the South German states of Baden, Württemberg and...

 of 1870, he escaped from France to London with his 121 parrot

Parrot

Parrots, also known as psittacines , are birds of the roughly 372 species in 86 genera that make up the order Psittaciformes, found in most tropical and subtropical regions. The order is subdivided into three families: the Psittacidae , the Cacatuidae and the Strigopidae...

s and cockatoo

Cockatoo

A cockatoo is any of the 21 species belonging to the bird family Cacatuidae. Along with the Psittacidae and the Strigopidae , they make up the parrot order Psittaciformes . Placement of the cockatoos as a separate family is fairly undisputed, although many aspects of the other living lineages of...

s. He also shared his rooms with two ape

Ape

Apes are Old World anthropoid mammals, more specifically a clade of tailless catarrhine primates, belonging to the biological superfamily Hominoidea. The apes are native to Africa and South-east Asia, although in relatively recent times humans have spread all over the world...

s, one of which he named Isadora, in honour of Isidor Philipp. Alkan himself composed Marcia funèbre sulla morte d'un papagallo (Funeral March on the Death of a Parrot). In 1873 he was appointed professor at the Paris Conservatoire, where his pupils included Olga Samaroff

Olga Samaroff

Olga Samaroff was a pianist, music critic, and teacher. Her second husband was conductor Leopold Stokowski.Samaroff was born Lucy Mary Agnes Hickenlooper in San Antonio, Texas, and grew up in Galveston, where her family owned a business later wiped out in the Great 1900 Galveston hurricane...

 (one-time wife of Leopold Stokowski

Leopold Stokowski

Leopold Anthony Stokowski was a British-born, naturalised American orchestral conductor, well known for his free-hand performing style that spurned the traditional baton and for obtaining a characteristically sumptuous sound from many of the great orchestras he conducted.In America, Stokowski...

) and Marie Poitevin, the first performer of César Franck

César Franck

César-Auguste-Jean-Guillaume-Hubert Franck was a composer, pianist, organist, and music teacher who worked in Paris during his adult life....

's Prelude, Chorale and Fugue

Prelude, Chorale and Fugue (Franck)

Prelude, Chorale and Fugue for solo piano is a work written in 1884 by the Belgian composer César Franck.As the name implies, it comprises three movements: a prelude, a chorale and a fugue...

in 1885. Other pupils were Carrier-Belleuse, Loire, Lefour, Haincelain and Van Barentzen.

Delaborde was a fencer, a passionate athlete, a bon vivant and a ladies' man. He also painted under the pseudonym "Miriam", and was a close friend of Édouard Manet

Édouard Manet

Édouard Manet was a French painter. One of the first 19th-century artists to approach modern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism....

. He was in the circle of Pauline Viardot, Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was a Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright. His first major publication, a short story collection entitled A Sportsman's Sketches, is a milestone of Russian Realism, and his novel Fathers and Sons is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century...

 and Ernest Guiraud

Ernest Guiraud

Ernest Guiraud was a French composer and music teacher born in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is best known for writing the traditional orchestral recitatives used for Bizet's opera Carmen and for Offenbach's opera Les contes d'Hoffmann .- Biography :Guiraud began his schooling in Louisiana under the...

, and became a close friend of Georges Bizet

Georges Bizet

Georges Bizet formally Alexandre César Léopold Bizet, was a French composer, mainly of operas. In a career cut short by his early death, he achieved few successes before his final work, Carmen, became one of the most popular and frequently performed works in the entire opera repertory.During a...

. Delaborde may have been indirectly responsible for Bizet's death, which followed a swimming competition between the two, as a result of which Bizet caught a chill. After Bizet's death, Delaborde formed an alliance with his widow Geneviève, and they were even engaged to be married, but the engagement was broken off. In 1901 he became engaged to a much younger pupil, but it also failed to result in marriage.

His compositions included a youthful opera Maître Martin, the opéra-comique La Reine dort, the overture Attila, preludes, studies and fantasies for piano (including a Grande Fantaise on Bizet's Carmen

Carmen

Carmen is a French opéra comique by Georges Bizet. The libretto is by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, based on the novella of the same title by Prosper Mérimée, first published in 1845, itself possibly influenced by the narrative poem The Gypsies by Alexander Pushkin...

), a piano quintet, and songs. There is also a Scherzetto for chromatic harp. He also edited some of Alkan's music. Camille Saint-Saëns

Camille Saint-Saëns

Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns was a French Late-Romantic composer, organist, conductor, and pianist. He is known especially for The Carnival of the Animals, Danse macabre, Samson and Delilah, Piano Concerto No. 2, Cello Concerto No. 1, Havanaise, Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, and his Symphony...

' Piano Concerto No. 3

Piano Concerto No. 3 (Saint-Saëns)

The Piano Concerto No. 3 in E flat major, Op. 29 by Camille Saint-Saëns, was composed in 1869. The concerto is written in 3 movements. When the concerto was first performed by Saint-Saëns himself at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in 1869 it was not well received, possibly because of its harmonic...

 was dedicated to Delaborde.

Delaborde died on 9 December 1913, aged 74, and was buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery

Père Lachaise Cemetery

Père Lachaise Cemetery is the largest cemetery in the city of Paris, France , though there are larger cemeteries in the city's suburbs.Père Lachaise is in the 20th arrondissement, and is reputed to be the world's most-visited cemetery, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors annually to the...

on 11 December.