When Dukas lost control
In releasing the spells of Goethe’s poem, Dukas got more than he bargained for
The magic that the French composer wove in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice gave his ten-minute orchestral masterpiece a life all of its own, says Tom Service
Here’s a cautionary tale of how one composer’s self-critical brilliance meant he was subsumed by the uncontrollable magical chaos described in the fantastical poem his piece was based upon. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice turned Paul Dukas into a one-hit wonder, most famously as an accompaniment to an animated mouse and the wizard Yen Sid. (Spell that backwards: got it? Dis Ney, in the famous sequence in Disney’s film Fantasia.)
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is an acme of magical orchestral imagination that releases a power that has bewitched audiences since 1897, and whose popularity has nearly totally eclipsed the rest of Dukas’s reputation. In releasing the spells of Goethe’s poem, Dukas got much more than he bargained for, just as the hapless apprentice in the story can’t command the brooms who unleash a tumultuous flood in the wizard’s lair.
The piece’s bewitchment over its audiences is easy to understand. Goethe’s poem was famous throughout Europe by the late-19th century, and French musical culture had embarked on a search for a transcendence of the mundane into the spectacular, a transformation of the materials of music into the stuff of phantasmagoria.
The miracle of Dukas’s story-telling in his ten-minute ‘orchestral scherzo’ is that it’s both absolutely clear in its depiction of the drama of Goethe’s poem, and yet it creates its own essentially musical momentum. That means we hear a magic at the start of the piece that’s made of a precisely woven sonic gossamer, crafted from Dukas’s alchemy of augmented and diminished chords – those ambiguous harmonic undecidables that suspend all of us in a state of ‘what next?’ – in contrast to the woody reality of those orchestral broom-handles, the bassoons, who sing the brooms’ diatonic tune, a triple-time, instantly memorable ear-worm.
Dukas even makes clear the moment when the Apprentice splits the broom apart with his axe in a vain attempt to stop its infernal water-carrying obsession – only to find to his horror that one broom has become two. Dukas repeats the broom-tune, but this time it is dissonantly doubled, catalysing the work’s maelstrom of a climax before the Wizard intervenes to stop the chaos.
Dukas grew to resent the popularity of his scherzo, occluding the reputation of his C major symphony, his opera Ariane et Barbe-bleue and his ballet La Péri. What he would have thought of the uncontrollably globe-conquering multimedia success of Fantasia, released in 1940 five years after his death, might not have been printable.
And yet the brilliance of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and its out-of-control popularity, is that the real wizard isn’t Yen Sid, nor Goethe’s Sorcerer: it’s Dukas himself, conjuring an orchestral spell we still want to be intoxicated by. We are all listener-brooms, in uncontrollable thrall to the composer’s magic.