Paul Dukas
[4] He entered the Conservatoire de Paris at the end of 1881, aged 16, and studied piano with Georges Mathias, harmony with Théodore Dubois and composition with Ernest Guiraud.
[6] Dukas's career as a critic began in 1892 with a review of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen conducted by Gustav Mahler at Covent Garden in London.
[6] In a study of Dukas published towards the end of the composer's life, Irving Schwerké wrote, "The work … is an opulent expression of modernism in classical form.
Its ideational luxuriance, nobility of utterance and architectural solidity mark it as one of the most conspicuous achievements of contemporaneous writing, and magnificently refute the generally prevalent notion that no French composer has ever produced a great symphony.
Schwerké wrote of it: Expressed in an individual and spontaneous idiom, the Symphony in C gives free play to the author's creative spirit and to his fund of exalted emotion.
Its logical structure, strong thematic material, polyphonic richness and virile instrumentation combine to create an exhilarating effect of life and pageant color.
[9] The symphony was followed by another orchestral work, by far the best known of Dukas' compositions, his scherzo for orchestra, L'apprenti sorcier (The Sorcerer's Apprentice) (1897), a short piece (lasting for between 10 and 12 minutes in performance)[10] based on Goethe's poem "Der Zauberlehrling".
[7] In 2011, the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians observed, "The popularity of L'apprenti sorcier and the exhilarating film version of it in Disney's Fantasia possibly hindered a fuller understanding of Dukas, as that single work is far better known than its composer.
The Sonata, described by the critic Edward Lockspeiser as "huge and somewhat recondite",[11] did not enter the mainstream repertoire, but it has been more recently championed by such pianists as Marc-André Hamelin and Margaret Fingerhut.
His second attempt, L'arbre de science, was abandoned, incomplete, but in the same year he began work on his one completed opera, Ariane et Barbe-bleue (Ariadne and Bluebeard).
[4] Nonetheless, within a short time of its premiere, Dukas's opera was produced in Vienna, where it aroused much interest in Schoenberg's circle, and in Frankfurt, Milan and New York.
[4] It did not maintain a regular place in the repertory, despite the advocacy of Arturo Toscanini, who conducted it in New York three years in succession,[17] and Sir Thomas Beecham, who pronounced it "one of the finest lyrical dramas of our time,"[18] and staged it at Covent Garden in 1937.
Described by the composer as a "poème dansé" it depicts a young Persian prince who travels to the ends of the Earth in a quest to find the lotus flower of immortality, coming across its guardian, the Péri (fairy).
[21] Because of the very quiet opening pages of the ballet score, the composer added a brief "Fanfare pour précéder La Peri" which gave the typically noisy audiences of the day time to settle in their seats before the work proper began.
His many students included Jehan Alain, Elsa Barraine, Yvonne Desportes, Francis Chagrin, Carlos Chávez, Maurice Duruflé, Georges Hugon, Jean Langlais, Olivier Messiaen, Walter Piston, Manuel Ponce, Joaquín Rodrigo, David Van Vactor and Xian Xinghai.
"[6] Grove observes that his wide knowledge of the history of European music, and his editorial work on Rameau, Scarlatti and Beethoven, gave him "particular authority in teaching historical styles".
[5] Shortly before his death he had been working on a symphonic poem inspired by Shakespeare's The Tempest,[5] a play of which he had made a French translation in 1918 with an operatic version in mind.
