Paul Dukas

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2009)

Paul Abraham Dukas (October 1, 1865 – May 17, 1935) was a French composer and teacher of classical music.

[edit] Biography

Paul Dukas was born in Paris to a Jewish father and Catholic mother. He studied under Théodore Dubois and Ernest Guiraud at the Conservatoire de Paris, where he became friends with the composer Claude Debussy. After completing his studies Dukas found work as a music critic and orchestrator; he was unusually gifted in orchestration and was one of the most sensitive and insightful critics of the era.^{[citation needed]}

Although Dukas wrote a fair amount of music, he was a perfectionist and destroyed many of his pieces out of dissatisfaction with them. Only a few of his compositions remain. His first surviving work of note is the energetic Symphony in C (1896), which belongs to the tradition of Beethoven and César Franck. Like Franck's only symphony, Dukas' is in three movements rather than the conventional four: Allegro non troppo, ma con fuoco; Andante espressive e fuoco; Allegro spiritoso.^[1]

The symphony was followed by another orchestral work, L'apprenti sorcier (English: The Sorcerer's Apprentice) (1897), which is based on Goethe's poem "Der Zauberlehrling". The Sorcerer's Apprentice was used (in a slightly redacted version) in the Walt Disney film Fantasia - a total of perhaps one minute of the ten-and-a-half minute piece was omitted. Dukas's rhythmic mastery and vivid orchestration are evident in both the Symphony in C and the The Sorcerer's Apprentice.

For the piano, Dukas wrote two complex and technically demanding large-scale works, a Sonata in E-flat minor (1901) and Variations, interlude and finale on a theme of Rameau (1902), again reminiscent of Beethoven and Franck. (There are also two smaller works for piano solo.) The Sonata did not enter the mainstream repertoire, but it has been more recently championed by such pianists as Marc-André Hamelin.

The opera Ariane et Barbe-Bleue ("Ariadne and Bluebeard"), on which he worked from 1899 to 1907, has often been compared to Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, partly because of musical similarities and partly because both operas are based on libretti by Maurice Maeterlinck. Dukas's last major work was the sumptuous oriental ballet La Péri (1912) about a man who reached the Ends of the Earth in a quest to find immortality, coming across a mythical Peri, holding The Flower of Immortality.

In the last decades of his life, Dukas became well known as a teacher of composition, with many famous students including Joaquín Rodrigo, Manuel Ponce, Maurice Duruflé, Olivier Messiaen, Jehan Alain, Carlos Chávez, and David Van Vactor. After Dukas died, he joined the scores of other famous people buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

[edit] See also

• The Sorcerer's Apprentice

[edit] Footnotes