The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Paul Dukas‘s Symphonic Scherzo The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1897) is a remarkably vivid, graceful, imaginative and haunting work. It has been described in reputable publications as being better known than its author or as being just about the only piece in his oeuvre. This is a stretch in reality, but the play undoubtedly epitomises its author’s musical quill. Paul Dukas is a Parisian from an elite Jewish family. His mother, an amateur musician, died at the birth of the third child in the family when Dukas was only 5 years old. His close relationship with his father and older brother created an attachment and brought him great grief at their deaths. This set the profile of his personal and professional path. He married late, in his 50s, developed the demeanor of an honest and decent man, was extremely critical of his own work, and as a result burned most of his manuscripts at the end of his life. He graduated from the Paris Conservatoire under Ernest Guiraud, but failures in applying for the Prix de Rome ( like those of Hector Berlioz) cut him off from composition for a time. He took up music criticism, but at the same time wrote an overture and a symphony which brought him fame. It was also during this period that he composed The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Over the years he added the Piano Sonata, the opera Ariane et Barbe-bleue (Ariadne and Bluebeard) after Maeterlinck, the ballet La Péri (1912), the Les Variations, interlude et finale sur un thème de Rameau, and the Symphony in C major. In 1924 he wrote Amours, a sonnet for voice and piano based on the 16th -century poetry of Pierre de Ronsard. From 1928 he taught composition classes at the Paris Conservatoire and the École Normale de Musique, where his students included Olivier Messiaen, Maurice Duruflé and Lubomir Pipkov.

Dukas wrote The Sorcerer’s Apprentice 100 years after and based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s ballad of the same name (Der Zauberlehrling), which in turn drew its plot from the second-century Greek satirist Lucian of Samosata. The poetic realisation of the programme is not inferior in skill to the opuses of Liszt and R. Strauss. The story is well known from the 1940 Walt Disney Studios animated film Fantasia, where Mickey Mouse plays the role of the apprentice. The music of Dukas is there conducted by Leopold Stokowski.

The magician apprentice, in his master’s absence, finds a solution to his hard work in fetching water from the river. He casts a spell on the broom, which begins to carry the water. Forgetting the command to undo the spell, the house floods, the apprentice tries to destroy the broom with an axe, but its parts come to life and become an army of water-carrying brooms. The wizard appears, restores order, and enforces the rule that only he can perform the spells.

Dukas conducted the first performance of the piece at a concert of the Société Nationale de Musique on 18 May 1897.

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