Paul Dukas (1865–1935) was a French composer whose fame today is largely due to one piece, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, written in 1897. Dukas was not a prolific composer at all, limited to only fourteen known surviving compositions, partially due to his parallel careers as a scholar, critic, and teacher, but mostly due to his own self-criticism. After he wrote his ballet La Péri in 1912, a piece that rarely gets performed today outside the Fanfare that he wrote to precede the ballet proper, he mostly retired from composing to focus on teaching, even going so far as to destroy many of his finished works.

Dukas was born to a banker father and a homemaker mother, though she was a skilled pianist and would become his first teacher. He didn’t show much promise as a pianist, but he began composing at the age of 14 and found his calling. At 16, he entered the Paris Conservatoire and studied there with George Mathias, Théodore Dubois, and Ernest Guiraud. There, he would become close friends with Claude Debussy. Despite winning several prizes while a student in Paris, he left the school in 1889 after coming in second in the Prix de Rome for his cantata Velléda. Dukas would go on to have, as mentioned earlier, parallel careers in criticism and composition. He would chiefly write operas with some orchestral pieces and piano pieces peppered into his oeuvre, but he would leave this behind in 1927 following Charles-Marie Widor’s retirement from the Paris Conservatoire. Taking that appointment and also teaching at the École normale de musique in the same city, he would count among his students such varied and explosive talents as Carlos Chávez, Maurice Duruflé, Olivier Messiaen, Walter Piston, Joaquín Rodrigo, and Xian Xinghai.