Runtime: Approx. 3 minutes

Paul Dukas was a French composer, teacher, and music critic, known in his lifetime as an excellent composer and a particularly deft orchestrator. But today he has become what we might affectionately term a one-hit-wonder after Disney’s popular adaptation of his symphonic poem, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, launched the work into the popular zeitgeist. Dukas’ rather small catalog of enduring works was partially of his own making; he was exceptionally self-critical and destroyed much of his music later in life for fear that it wasn’t good enough. La Péri was nearly one of those lost works, but he was ultimately persuaded by a friend to allow the piece to remain.

La Péri is a one-act ballet written originally for Paris’s famed Ballet Russes, and was to feature the company’s star danseur Vaslav Nijinsky alongside ballerina Natalia Trouhanova. Unfortunately, the Ballet’s director Sergei Diaghilev felt that Trouhanova’s dancing was not strong enough to feature alongside the famous Nijinsky and the production was canceled. The work was finally given its premiere a year later by the Théâtre du Châtelet and starred Trouhanova and another male lead.

The Fanfare was added after the completion of the rest of the music and mostly served to startle and hopefully quiet down the typically rowdy 1912 audience. Just three minutes long, it uses only the orchestra’s brass section and is perhaps Dukes’ only work that comes close to rivaling The Sorcerer’s Apprentice in popularity, frequently serving the same purpose in today’s concert halls for which it was originally intended: to start the show.

In addition to composing, Dukas taught both orchestration and later composition at the Paris conservatory where his pupils included significant young composers Maurice Duruflé, Olivier Messiaen, and Manuel Ponce. He also wrote extensively as a music critic and scholar, authoring some of the most thorough essays written on the music of Rameau, Gluck, and the composer featured on our second half, Hector Berlioz.