FAMOUS COMPOSER

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 7, 8 July 1935, Page 16

FAMOUS COMPOSER

DEATH OF PAUL DUKAS We regret to announce the death of M. Paul Dukas, the French composer, who died in Paris, aged 70, says the "Manchester Guardian." '*' Although" not a prolific composer and the founder of no school, Dukas stood for all that is most noble and aloof in the musical production' of present-day France. He was, in this sense, a true disciple of Cesar Franck, although he had never actually enjoyed that master's instruction. Paul Dukas was born in Paris in 1865; About 1882 he entered the Paris Conservatoire. He won the second Prix de Rome in 1888, competed, unsuccessfully for the Grand Prix in 1889, abandoned music for a time, and joined the army.

By this time he had already composed overtures to "King Lear" and to Goethe's "Gotz.von Berlichingen," but it was not.tuntil his Symphony in C major appeared in 1897 that he began to be taken seriously as a composer. The same year, oddly enough, saw the production of the work which is responsible for the fact that he was for the rest of his life condemned to not being taken quite seriously enough. This was, needless to say, "L'Apprenti Sorcier," the orchestral scherzo inspired by Goethe's "Zuberlehrling," a brilliant study in musical humour and characterisation, but a slender piece in comparison with works like the Piano Sonata in E flat minor (1900), the "Variations on a Theme of Rameau" for the same instrument (1903), the operatic setting of , Maeterlinck's "Ariane et Barbe-Bleue" '(1907), and the dance-poem "La Peri" (1911).

The six last-named works, with the overture to Corneille's "Polyeucte," are virtually the whole output of Paul Dukas that will live in musical history. But if it is small in bulk it makes an imposing show by reason of its dignity and a certain solidity that is so rare a quality in French music as to amount, from the nationalist point of view, almost to a defect. His work has indeed been adversely judged by many French critics for a somewhat laborious formality and a lack of grace and fanciful invention, and it is true that it suffers from an excessive devotion to pure form for form's sake and from an almost ascetic anxiety to avoid sensuous beauty as an end in itself. But the austerity of Dukas is not due to dry academicism but to the absolute integrity of a fastidious artist who wished to set down nothing that did not truthfully express his personality.

In 1906 Paul Dukas was created Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, and in 1909 he became a member of the council of the Conservatoire, where he also took iCfaarge^p^f/the r orches^aJ^:iasf Aj