1865–1935 · France · Romantic
Paul Dukas (1865–1935) was a French composer, music critic and teacher. His best-known work is the orchestral scherzo The Sorcerer's Apprentice. He also wrote the opera Ariane et Barbe-bleue, the ballet La Péri and two large works for solo piano. Late in life Dukas taught composition at the Paris Conservatoire.
Paul Abraham Dukas was born in Paris on 1 October 1865 into a Jewish family with three children. His father, Jules Jacques Dukas, worked in banking and the grain trade. His mother, Eugénie, was a pianist; she died giving birth to her youngest daughter, when the boy was five. His mother's family came from Metz in Lorraine, and his father's from Erlisheim in Alsace.
From childhood Paul learned to play the piano, and he began to compose at fourteen, while recovering from an illness.
Dukas joined the Paris Conservatoire at the end of 1881. His teachers were Georges Mathias for piano, Théodore Dubois for harmony and Ernest Guiraud for composition. Among his fellow students was Claude Debussy, and the two became close friends.
His first large works were two overtures of 1883, Goetz von Berlichingen and King Lear. The manuscript of the second was found again only in the 1990s, and that overture was first performed in 1995.
In 1888 Dukas won second prize in the competition for the Prix de Rome, the Conservatoire's most important award, with his cantata Velléda. He did not win first prize and was disappointed, and in 1889 he left the Conservatoire. After military service Dukas returned to composing, resumed his studies of music theory and began to combine work as a composer with work as a music critic.
Dukas achieved his first success in 1892, with a Paris performance of the overture Polyeucte, which draws on a tragedy by Corneille. Around the same time his criticism began appearing in print. The first piece was a review of Wagner's Ring cycle as conducted by Gustav Mahler at Covent Garden, London, printed in La Revue Hebdomadaire. In later years he contributed to other journals as well.
Dukas was a perfectionist and judged his own music very strictly: he destroyed many manuscripts, so little survives from this period. After Polyeucte he began an opera, Horn et Riemenhild, to his own libretto, but wrote only one act.
In the 1890s Dukas wrote the Symphony in C major, dedicated to the conductor Paul Vidal, who directed its first performance. Its reception was mixed; it was better received when the Lamoureux Orchestra brought it back into its repertoire in 1902.
Next came the orchestral scherzo The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1897), based on a poem by Goethe. It lasts ten to twelve minutes in performance and became Dukas's most popular work. The fame of this piece overshadowed the composer's other works, and he found such popularity irritating.
In the ten years after The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Dukas finished two intricate, technically demanding works for solo piano: the Sonata (1901), which he dedicated to Saint-Saëns, and a set of variations on a Rameau theme with an interlude and a finale (1902). Édouard Risler gave the first performances of both. Critics found in these pieces the influence of Beethoven as César Franck understood him. The sonata did not enter the main repertoire; in recent years pianists such as Marc-André Hamelin and Margaret Fingerhut have taken it up.
In 1899 Dukas turned to opera again. A second try, L'arbre de science, was left incomplete; still, that same year he started the only opera he would finish, Ariane et Barbe-bleue, with a libretto by Maurice Maeterlinck. Maeterlinck had originally intended the text for Grieg, but in 1899 he gave it to Dukas instead. Dukas spent seven years on the score, and it reached the stage at the Opéra-Comique in 1907.
Productions soon followed in Vienna, Frankfurt, Milan and New York, and in Vienna the work drew the attention of Schoenberg's circle. It never secured a regular place in the repertoire, though Arturo Toscanini championed it, conducting it in New York three years running, and so did Sir Thomas Beecham, who put it on at Covent Garden in 1937. The 1990s brought a revival of interest.
Dukas's final large-scale work was the ballet La Péri (1912), which he himself called a dance poem. Its hero is a young prince from Persia who journeys to the very edge of the world looking for the flower of immortality. The dancer Natalia Trouhanova, of Russian and French background, was the one for whom it was created, and she took the leading role when it was first staged at the Théâtre du Châtelet.
In 1916 Dukas married Suzanne Pereyra; in December 1919 their daughter Adrienne-Thérèse was born.
After La Péri Dukas completed no new large works, and he destroyed the sketches that remained. Even so, in 1920 he wrote a piano piece, La plainte, au loin, du faune, in tribute to his friend Debussy. Then came Amours, a setting of a sonnet by Ronsard for voice and piano, issued in 1924 to coincide with the poet's four-hundredth birthday. Not long before he died, the composer had been sketching a symphonic poem drawn from Shakespeare's The Tempest; in 1918 he had made a French translation of the play, thinking of an opera.
From the early 1920s Dukas worked on questions of music education in the French provinces. In the late 1920s he became a composition professor at the Paris Conservatoire, taking over from Charles-Marie Widor, and he gave lessons at the École normale de musique in the same city. Thanks to his deep knowledge of Europe's musical history and his work as an editor of Rameau, Scarlatti and Beethoven, he carried special weight when it came to teaching earlier styles.
His pupils included Olivier Messiaen, Maurice Duruflé, Joaquín Rodrigo, Jehan Alain, Jean Langlais, Walter Piston, Carlos Chávez, Manuel Ponce and Xian Xinghai. As a teacher Dukas was conservative but always encouraged talent.
Dukas did not side with either the conservative or the progressive camp of French musicians, and both groups admired him and counted him a friend. In 1920 Vincent d'Indy brought out a study of Dukas's music; Saint-Saëns collaborated with him on finishing an opera that Guiraud had left incomplete. In 1921 Fauré dedicated his Piano Quintet No. 2 to him. Dukas was made a member of the Royal Academy of Belgium for science, letters and the fine arts in 1920 and, in the last year of his life, was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts.
Paul Dukas died in Paris in May 1935. He rests in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.
French musicians of Dukas's day were divided into conservative and progressive camps, but he joined neither. His music drew, among others, on Beethoven, Berlioz, Franck, d'Indy and Debussy. In The Sorcerer's Apprentice and the Symphony in C major one notices the composer's skill, his vivid and original orchestration and a style of his own.
Dukas's own severity led him to destroy many manuscripts, so his output is small. Surviving works include an opera, Ariane et Barbe-bleue; a symphony in C major; a piano sonata; a ballet, La Péri; and, for solo piano, a set of variations on a theme of Rameau with an interlude and a finale. The best known remains the scherzo The Sorcerer's Apprentice, and the fame of that single piece has overshadowed the rest.
For solo piano Dukas wrote two large pieces: the Sonata (1901) and a set of variations on a Rameau theme with an interlude and a finale (1902). Both are complex works that make heavy technical demands, and critics heard Beethoven in them. The composer also wrote two smaller pieces for solo piano. Later pieces include a tribute to his friend Debussy, La plainte, au loin, du faune, composed in 1920, and Amours, a setting of a Ronsard sonnet for voice and piano.
For the stage Dukas wrote the opera Ariane et Barbe-bleue (1907) after Maeterlinck. It was often compared with Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande: both operas are settings of Maeterlinck, and Dukas even quoted Debussy in his own score. The composer called the ballet La Péri (1912) a dance poem; it was his last large work.
Dukas did more than compose: he worked as a music critic, edited the music of Rameau, Scarlatti and Beethoven, and taught composition. Messiaen, Rodrigo and Duruflé studied in his composition class.
The site's catalogue has Villanelle by Dukas (level "intermediate+").