Tone Poem Tuesday

Like many a lover of classical music, I suspect, my knowledge of composer Paul Dukas can be summed up in one sentence: "He wrote The Sorceror's Apprentice."

Which he did.

The Sorceror's Apprentice is pretty much the only work by Dukas to enter the standard repertoire, and I couldn't begin to tell you without Googling what else he might have written. This is partly because apparently Dukas was extremely self-critical, and he actually destroyed a good number of his own works rather than let them be heard. A number of his works have survived, but as of this writing, Dukas remains to me entirely unknown outside of this one tremendously famous piece (which received an assist from Walt Disney when it was included in Fantasia).

Here is The Sorceror's Apprentice.