Paul Dukas Overview

Paul Dukas was from a French-Jewish family. He studied under Théodore Dubois and Ernest Guiraud at the Conservatoire de Paris, where he became friends with the composer Claude Debussy. After completing his studies Dukas found work as a music critic and... [more]

Paul Dukas was from a French-Jewish family. He studied under Théodore Dubois and Ernest Guiraud at the Conservatoire de Paris, where he became friends with the composer Claude Debussy. After completing his studies Dukas found work as a music critic and orchestrator; he was unusually gifted in orchestration and was one of the most sensitive and insightful critics of the era. Although Dukas wrote a fair amount of music, he was a perfectionistic and destroyed many of his pieces out of dissatisfaction with them. Only a few of his compositions remain. His first surviving work of note is the energetic Symphony in C (1896), which belongs to the tradition of Beethoven and César Franck. Like Franck's only symphony, Dukas' is in three movements rather than the conventional four: Allegro non troppo, ma con fuoco; Andante espressive e fuoco; Allegro spiritoso. [show less]