Mildred Clary was born in Paris in a music lover family. Her English father made her discover the wealth of ancient lute music and her French mother was a pianist, a pupil of Ricardo Viñes and Marguerite Long. But she did not put herself to music until late. She began her career as a concertmaster on guitar and later on lute and played incidental music in the pit of The Old Vic Theatre of London. She decided to leave England and settle in France. She asked the director of the Old Vic for recommendations to French directors. The latter sent him to Jean Vilar and Jean-Louis Barrault, who both hired her. For in the 1950s, she was one of the few in France to play the lute at a time when few factors were making such instruments. She met Countess Thibault de Chambure, founder of the "Société de musique d'autrefois" and future curator of the instruments museum of the Conservatoire de Paris, who lent her an original old instrument of her rich personal collection. Mildred Clary played under the direction of Pierre Boulez and Hermann Scherchen at the Domaine musical and participated in many stage music as lutist for Jean Vilar. In 1956, she recorded the hommage Le Tombeau de Claude Debussy, by Manuel de Falla, reissued in the anthology box set Les Introuvables de Manuel de Falla. During the 1950s and 1960s, she also made different recordings of early music for the lute, in solo or with singers. In them, she displayed a very fine musical sensitivity. In 1955, she became a producer of radio broadcasts for French radio and subsequently for France Culture and France Musique. She first produced a series entitled Poète prends ton luth in which she intervened as an instrumentalist. She then abandoned the instrument for "physiological reasons" to focus only on the broadcasts she now hosted. The first series of the very numerous ones she produced on radio was Musica britannica. She was interested in the music of India and Japan as well as composers of the twentieth century such as Jean Sibelius, Benjamin Britten, Olivier Greif, and conductors, great performers and music venues in Europe and around the world. She conducted interviews with painters, such as Jean Bazaine, or produced a culinary series entitled les Mets et les notes, for France musique, whose guests realized recipes in real time. With her accomplice, the director Annie Roger, she delivered a very beautiful work, proposing very elaborate programs that nevertheless never lost the natural evocative of the report on the live, when she left the studios of the. On television, she notably produced Un ton au-dessus, for the first channel of the Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française, La musique buissonnière, for France 3, La Leçon de musique for TF1 and Opus, for Arte. Her field of interest was very wide, Indian music to contemporary western music, jazz. Claude Samuel, also a producer at France Musique, who was Director of Music at Radio France, recalls that during the Mozart year, she provided a daily program of which a CD was born, Mozart - la traversée ultime. She asked that a sentence by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth be inscribed on the CD cover: Claude Samuel emphasizes in his homage, where he evokes Her colleague Renaud Machart paid hommage to Mildred Clary during a series Grandes figures from 20 to 24 December 2010 on France Musique.
Works
2000: Georg Friedrich Haendel, with Jean-Claude Donda, illustré par Charlotte Voake - Gallimard Jeunesse/ Erato
