Malherbe was born in Bucharest. In Paris he wrote for
Le Temps, the magazine
Excelsior, and later for
La Revue des vivants, ("organe de la génération de la guerre"), of which he was co-director with
Henry de Jouvenel. Malherbe fought in the
First World War. In 1919 he was a co-founder and first president of the . In 1953 the association established the
Henry Malherbe Prize for essays in his honour. In 1918 the reviewer in the magazine
North American Review wrote:
Music Malherbe took a particular interest in musical matters. His interview with
Claude Debussy in 1911 is quoted extensively by the composer's biographer
Léon Vallas; his criticisms of the
Conservatoire de Paris for what he saw as its reactionary agenda and declining standards were reported in Britain and the US, in
The Times and by
Richard Aldrich, music critic of
The New York Times. As a critic, Malherbe was less inclined than some of his colleagues to take new works at face value: he spotted, as many other critics did not, what he called "the heated eroticism" that lay below the seemingly "innocent neoclassical surface" of
Francis Poulenc's 1924 ballet
Les biches. In his book about
Bizet's
Carmen, published in 1951, Malherbe offered what the journal
Hommes et mondes called an analysis "of rare lucidity" of the origins, libretto and score of the opera, and presented hitherto unpublished information about the circumstances of the composer's early death; in this Malherbe raised the possibility that unhappy in love and in despair at "the conspiracy of critics who had condemned Carmen", Bizet may not have died of illness but had killed himself. Malherbe's other books on music attracted some adverse comment from his contemporaries for his propensity to speculate about his subjects. His biography of
Schubert (1949) was criticised in
Music & Letters for "sketches circumstantially describing scenes for which we have not a shred of evidence. … M. Malherbe allows himself again and again to be carried away by his enthusiasm into writing bookstall fiction." His 1938
Richard Wagner révolutionnaire also suffered from some "rather fictitious" biography, according to the
Revue De Musicologie.
Later years Malherbes was appointed a
Commandeur de la Légion d'Honneur in April 1953. He died in Paris in 1958, at the age of 72. ==Works==