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Paul Dukas

Paul Dukas is best remembered for his tone poem The Sorcerer's Apprentice, indelibly etched in popular visual memory as Mickey Mouse in a star-spangled robe and wizard's hat, waving a wand at an army of brooms. Dukas worked hard at being a composer, critic, and teacher because music did not come to him as naturally as to others. His self-doubt led him to destroy many of his works, but the radiant sound and strength of technique mark what remains. Among those are his opera Ariane et Barbe-bleue, the ballet La Péri, and his Symphony in C. Born in Paris on October 1, 1865, into a prosperous banking family of Jewish ancestry, Dukas revealed average musical gifts as a child. He received his earliest training from his mother, a fine pianist, who died during his fifth year. At 16, having made music his chosen vocation, Dukas entered the Paris Conservatoire, studying harmony, piano, conducting, and orchestration. At 17, he wrote his first two adult compositions, overtures to Goethe's Götz von Berlichingen and Shakespeare's King Lear. He formally studied composition with Ernest Guiraud, but his submissions for the Prix de Rome competition in the years 1886 to 1889 were unsuccessful. This was the beginning of his pathological self-doubt that led to the destruction of almost half the total output of his creative maturity. Partly due to these disappointments, he left the school to fulfill his military service, which he completed in 1891. Dukas then began writing music criticism and resumed composition, entering his most productive compositional phase with the overture Polyeucte, introduced to widespread acclaim on January 23, 1892. During the following year, he abandoned his first projected opera, Horn et Rimenhild, and collaborated with Saint-Saëns in completing and orchestrating the opera Frédégonde by Guiraud. Dukas' Symphony in C, commenced in 1895, recalls the symphonies of Franck, d'Indy, and Chausson, the leading lights in the Societé Nationale de Musique formed to promote French composers, and also emulates those more extroverted French symphonists: Lalo, Bizet, and Saint-Saëns. The most famous work by Dukas, the "symphonic scherzo after Goethe," The Sorcerer's Apprentice, was written in the immediate aftermath of the Symphony, between January and May of 1897. For the next decade, he devoted himself to an opera, Ariane et Barbe-bleue, based on the work of Maurice Maeterlinck, while completing his Sonata for piano in E flat minor (1900). The ballet score La Péri (1911-1912), was originally intended as a one-act tableau for Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. It was the last work Dukas allowed to be submitted for publication and was saved from the ashes only after vigorous protests from the composer's closest associates. Even as he gained recognition as composer, Dukas became one of the foremost Parisian music critics of his generation, contributing articles and reviews to many of France's leading newspapers and journals. He was also a dedicated musicological researcher, editing authoritative critical editions of keyboard music by Rameau, Couperin, Scarlatti, and Beethoven, and served as a member of the composition faculty at the Paris Conservatoire from 1910 to 1913. Dukas died in Paris on May 17, 1935, without living to see his universal fame established as The Sorcerer's Apprentice became enshrined in American popular culture a mere five years later through the use of the work in the Walt Disney movie Fantasia.
© TiVo Staff /TiVo

Discographie

10 album(s) • Trié par Meilleures ventes

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