Paul Dukas

Paul Dukas remains most widely recognized for the tone poem The Sorcerer's Apprentice, forever linked in the public imagination with Mickey Mouse clad in a star-spangled robe and conical hat while directing a regiment of animated brooms. Because musical ideas did not flow effortlessly to him as they did for many contemporaries, he approached the roles of composer, critic, and instructor with deliberate rigor. Chronic self-questioning prompted him to discard numerous scores, yet the surviving pieces display luminous timbre and assured craftsmanship. These include the opera Ariane et Barbe-bleue, the ballet La Péri, and the Symphony in C.

He entered the world in Paris on October 1, 1865, into an affluent banking household of Jewish descent and displayed only ordinary musical aptitude during childhood. His mother, a skilled pianist, provided his initial instruction before her death in his fifth year. At sixteen he committed himself to a musical career and enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire for studies in harmony, piano, conducting, and orchestration. The following year he produced his first mature pieces, overtures inspired by Goethe's Götz von Berlichingen and Shakespeare's King Lear. Formal composition lessons came under Ernest Guiraud, yet repeated failures to win the Prix de Rome between 1886 and 1889 intensified his destructive self-doubt, ultimately resulting in the loss of nearly half his mature output. Discouraged, he withdrew from the institution to complete military service, which ended in 1891.

Thereafter he turned to music journalism while resuming creative work, achieving his most fertile period with the overture Polyeucte, which received broad acclaim on January 23, 1892. In the ensuing twelve months he set aside his initial opera project, Horn et Rimenhild, and joined Saint-Saëns in finishing and orchestrating Guiraud's Frédégonde. Begun in 1895, the Symphony in C echoes the symphonic manner of Franck, d'Indy, and Chausson, central figures of the Société Nationale de Musique dedicated to French composition, while also aligning with the more outgoing approach of Lalo, Bizet, and Saint-Saëns. Immediately after completing the symphony, between January and May of 1897, he wrote his best-known score, the "symphonic scherzo after Goethe" titled The Sorcerer's Apprentice. For the subsequent decade he concentrated on the opera Ariane et Barbe-bleue drawn from Maurice Maeterlinck, alongside the Sonata for piano in E flat minor completed in 1900. The ballet La Péri, composed between 1911 and 1912, had originally been conceived as a one-act tableau for Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes; it became the final score Dukas permitted to appear in print, rescued from destruction only through the urgent objections of his closest colleagues.

While his reputation as a composer grew, he ranked among the leading music critics in Paris, supplying articles and reviews to France's principal newspapers and periodicals. He also pursued musicological scholarship, preparing authoritative critical editions of keyboard works by Rameau, Couperin, Scarlatti, and Beethoven, and joined the composition faculty of the Paris Conservatoire from 1910 to 1913. Dukas died in Paris on May 17, 1935, without witnessing the universal recognition that arrived five years later when The Sorcerer's Apprentice was featured in the Walt Disney film Fantasia.