The Sorcerer's Apprentice (L'apprenti sorcier) is a symphonic poem by the French composer Paul Dukas, written in 1896-97. Subtitled "Scherzo after a ballad by Goethe," the piece was inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1797 poem of the same name. By far the most performed and recorded of Dukas's works, its notable appearance in the Walt Disney 1940 animated film Fantasia has led to the piece to becoming widely known to audiences outside the classical concert hall.
Contents |
Prior to The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Dukas had struggled to find his place as a composer in the world of French music and had embarked on a complementary career as a music critic and musicologist. An early symphonic overture Polyeucte (1892) was followed by an attempt to compose an opera, Horn et Riemenhild, but only the first act was ever completed. Between 1894 and 1896, while also busy preparing a newly revised edition of the works of Jean-Philippe Rameau for the publisher Durand, Dukas completed his Symphony in C, but the work was not widely performed.
In 1897, Dukas composed, in a relatively short time, the symphonic poem The Sorcerer's Apprentice, based on the Goethe ballad, which he knew in the French translation by Henri Blaze. Dukas conducted the premiere at a concert of the Société Nationale on 18 May 1897, and within a short time the work had established itself within the concert repertory.[1] Although the popularity of the work is widely connected to its appearance in the 1940 film Fantasia, it was in fact extremely popular with concert audiences from its debut. In an appreciation written in 1928 for the Musical Quarterly, the critic Irving Schwerke observed:
A success from the very beginning of its career, this remarkable composition has gone from triumph to triumph and brought universal renown to its author. Indeed, the world-fame of this masterpiece is so overwhelming, it must be accredited with having deprived of similar eminence other masterpieces by this composer. [2]
The work earned widespread critical approval, especially from contemporary French critics. Writing in Gil Blas in 1903, Claude Debussy noted of Dukas's style, "One may say that this emotional evocation is constructive, that it builds up a beauty like that of perfect architectural lines set in the colored spaces of the air and sky, mingling in a total, definite harmony."[3]
Inspired by the Goethe poem, Dukas's work is part of the larger Romantic genre of programmatic music, which composers like Franz Liszt, Claude Debussy, Jean Sibelius and Richard Strauss increasingly explored as an alternative to earlier symphonic forms. Unlike other tone poems, such as La Mer by Debussy or Finlandia by Sibelius, Dukas's work is, like works such as Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks by Strauss, descriptively programmatic, closely following the events described in the Goethe poem. It was customary, in fact, to publish the poem as part of the orchestral score.[4]
The instrumentation of the piece consists of two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets and bass clarinet, three bassoons and contrabassoon (or contrabass sarrusophone), four horns, two trumpets, two cornets, three trombones, timpani, glockenspiel, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, harp and strings. The formidable glockenspiel part is usually handled by a percussionist playing a special keyed glockenspiel.
Although The Sorcerer's Apprentice was already a popular concert piece, it was brought to a much larger audience through its inclusion in the 1940 Walt Disney animated concert film Fantasia, in which Mickey Mouse plays the role of the apprentice. Disney had acquired the music rights in 1937 when he planned to release a separate Mickey Mouse film, which, at the suggestion of Leopold Stokowski, was eventually expanded into Fantasia.[5]
Stokowski's version for the soundtrack of Fantasia remains one of the most famous. Although too early for high fidelity, the performance was recorded using multi-tracks and was the first use of stereophonic sound in a film. It is the only part of the film for which Stokowski conducted a studio orchestra, rather than the Philadelphia Orchestra.
In terms of the storyline of the film, the sorcerer's final anger with his apprentice which appears in Fantasia does not appear in Goethe's source poem, Der Zauberlehrling. The popularity of the musical piece in Fantasia led to it being used again in Fantasia 2000.
In 1930, William Cameron Menzies directed and Joseph M. Schenck produced a series of four short films of classical music. One, based on the Dukas music, was titled The Wizard's Apprentice. This short film has been released on DVD and shown on Classic Arts Showcase.
|
||||||||||||||||||||