Quatre poèmes hindous

The Quatre poèmes hindous ("Four Hindu poems") are a cycle of mélodies by the French composer Maurice Delage for soprano and chamber ensemble of two flutes, oboe, two clarinets, harp, and string quartet. Delage composed it in 1912 while he was visiting India. It is considered his first masterwork, and it remains the best known and most recorded of his works.

The performance lasts just under nine minutes.

At the end of the French Third Republic, the Far East was in fashion in France, particularly in certain artistic circles. The French composer Maurice Delage (1879–1961) travelled to British India at the end of 1911, largely funded by his father, who accompanied him. The visit lasted until May 1913. Delae named the mélodies he composed after the cities he was visiting when he composed them: Jaipur ("Jeypur"), Varanasi ("Bénarès"), Lahore, and Chennai ("Madras").

According to Philippe Rodriguez, the trip allowed the young composer to "reduce as much as possible an inferiority complex" he suffered from, despite ecouragement from Maurice Ravel, thanks to "the authenticity of an exoticism drawn from the source". Rodriguez states the Quatre poèmes hindous represent "one of the first attempts to introduce the melodic and rhythmic forms of Indian music to the language of Western music".

Delage likely had a piano, as he felt himself unable to compose without a keyboard He first made a version for soprano and piano and then magnified it with a rich harmonic instrumentation. The technique of the instruments, all solo, is so exact that the harmonic instrumentation seems to have been specified very early. The dates of composition are in the reverse order of the sequence of the mélodies: "Si vous pensez à elle ..." and Naissance de Bouddha were completed in January 1912, "Un sapin isolé ..." in February, and "Une belle ..." in March.

The instrumental formation is reduced effectively to chamber music, in which the piano is excluded. Michel Duchesneau sees in this the influence of Schönberg's Pierrot Lunaire, which premièred in Vienna on 16 December 1912 and which motivated Ravel and Stravinsky to compose their own poems during 1913. The work of Schönberg was also to have been included in the 1914 concert programme.Alexis Roland-Manuel refuted this influence on Delage, while Marius Flothuis () sees the instrumental ensemble as closer to that which Ravel used in 1905 for his Introduction and Allegro, which is left to flute, clarinet, harp, and string quartet.

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