Dukas: The Sorcerer's Apprentice



The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Duration: 12'
Publisher: Public Domain
KSO played: 2010, 1999


It is a determined and rarefied individual who can listen to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice without once thinking of Mickey Mouse.  With the possible exception of his debut, the sequence from Fantasia is by far his most famous outing.  Walt Disney bought the film rights for Dukas’s music in 1937, and the resulting cartoon made what was up to then a reasonably popular piece into a wildly successful one. 

Disney’s scheme was a grand one.  He envisaged not simply a film, but what we would now call a multi-media event.  Actors, lighting and technology were to be employed in theatres to create an immersive experience (which perhaps marks the root of the idea that became Disneyland).  New sequences would be added over the years so that it would constantly evolve.  Plans to shoot the film in widescreen and partly in 3-D came to nothing, but Leopold Stokowski’s recordings comprise one of the very first film soundtracks in stereo. 

So high is the regard in which Fantasia is now held that it is easy to forget that on its release in 1940 it was a box-office flop and largely dismissed as a pretentious folly.  The film’s failure meant that Walt Disney’s vision of an evolving film never happened.  When Disney Studios finally produced a sequel some sixty years later, it consisted of all-new animations, except for one: Mickey Mouse’s disastrous conjuring trick was simply too iconic to leave out.

Fantasia may have put the music indelibly into popular consciousness, but the credit for the plot must go to Goethe.  His 1797 ballad Der Zauberlehrling tells the tale of a sorcerer who leaves his workshop and instructs his apprentice to do his chores.  Bored with fetching water by pail, the apprentice decides to use magic to bring his broom to life to do the work for him.  Unfortunately he does not know how to make it stop and the workshop is soon flooded.  His attempt to solve the problem with an axe leads to further disaster: each splinter of the broom become a new broom, all of them marching unstoppably.  Fortunately the sorcerer returns and casts the spell necessary to bring everything back to rights. The poem ends with the sorcerer’s warning that raising powerful spirits is a matter only for a master.

Paul Dukas’s tone-poem dates from precisely a century later, in 1897.  Dukas is now considered something of a one hit wonder, but holds a more important place in the history of French music than this might suggest.  He was a contemporary of Debussy and taught a number of distinguished pupils including Messiaen and Rodrigo.  He also, like Debussy, made a successful career as an insightful critic.  His music is beautifully crafted and shows a sensibility highly attuned to the cutting edge of his time, but little of it survives: an extreme sense of perfectionism led him to destroy most of his own works 

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