Paul Dukas

Paul Dukas

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

Biography

Paul Dukas was from a French-Jewish family. 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.

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 radically redacted version) in the Walt Disney film Fantasia. Dukas's rhythmic mastery and vivid orchestration were evident in both works.

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. 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. The sumptuous oriental ballet La Péri (1912) was Dukas's last major work.

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.

Principal works

• Orchestral music:

Overtures (Götz von Berlichingen, Polyeucte, le Roi Lear)

Symphony (1896)

L'Apprenti sorcier (1897)

• Chamber music:

Alla Gitana, for cello and piano

Villanelle, for horn and piano

• Piano:

Variations, Interlude et final on a theme of Rameau

La plainte, au loin, du faune...

Prélude élégiaque sur le nom de Haydn

Sonata in E-flat minor

• Horn:

Villanelle

• Vocal:

Sonnet de Ronsard

Vocalise, for voice and piano

Cantatas (Hymne au soleil, Sémélé et Velléda)

• Ballet:

La Péri (1912)

• Opera:

Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (1907)

Footnotes

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Paul Dukas

External links

• Free scores by Paul Dukas in the International Music Score Library Project

Ballet portal