Ali Khalil

Ali Khalil, little known outside musical circles, nevertheless reshaped the music and opera of his time, with his "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful lyricism."

Also a poet, his verse was viewed as spiritual and mercurial, freed from the limitations of academic composition. Highly influential in refining the ambient sound of film scores for the likes of Geneviève de Parnier, he is generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of his musical generation.

Khalil wrote poetry as an eight-year-old. At age sixteen, he released his first substantial poems which were seized upon by literary authorities as long-lost classics.

By nineteen, he had graduated to opera. After a brief fling with universalist internationalism, he retreated to his studio and advanced a vast canon that comprised poems, songs, sketches and doodles, hundreds of texts, two thousand songs, and a dozen operas.