Background
Paul Dukas was born on the 1st of October, 1865 in Paris into a Jewish family, the son of Jules and Eugénie Dukas.
Paul Dukas was born on the 1st of October, 1865 in Paris into a Jewish family, the son of Jules and Eugénie Dukas.
Dukas studied music at the Paris Conservatoire, where his teachers were Theodore Dubois, César Franck, and Ernest Guiraud. There he met Claude Debussy and they remained life-long friends.
After graduation from Conservatoire Dukas worked as an orchestrator and critic. Ducas was also a serious critic of his own works. While he wrote a fair amount of music pieces in various genres, he was satisfied with only a few, that he let to remain. His Symphony (1896) was written in the grand tradition of Ludwig van Beethoven and César Franck. Building on the experience of his Beethovenian symphony, Dukas experimented with a variety of orchestral instruments in order to achieve his own distinctive orchestration. Inspired by his readings of Der Zauberlehrling, a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Dukas took on composing "L'apprenti sorcerer" (The Sorcerer's Apprentice) (1897). Truly a masterpiece, this symphonic work evolved with a lush score displaying intricate rhythmic patterns and his most illustrious orchestration. In it's soundscapes, alluding to both the preceding Classicism and Romanticism, and to his contemporary impressionism, Dukas had a premonition of the future styles of the coming 20th century. The lush score of The Sorcerer's Apprentice was used by Walt Disney in Fantasia (1940) and in the newer Фантазия 2000 (1999).
At the peak of his musical career Dukas was inspired by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev and his "Ballet Russes". He composed ballet La Peri (1912) for Diaghilev. His other works include the technically challenging Sonata (1901), Variations on the theme of Rameau (1902), and the opera Ariane et Barbe-bleue (Ariane and the Bliebeard), based on libretto by Maeterlinck.