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Paul Dukas is best remembered for his tone poem The Sorcerer's Apprentice, indelibly etched in popular visual memory as Mickey Mouse in a star-spangled robe and wizard's hat, waving a wand at an army of brooms. Dukas worked hard at being a composer, critic, and teacher because music did not come to him as naturally as to others. His self-doubt led him to destroy many of his works, but the radiant sound and strength of technique mark what remains. Among those are his opera Ariane et Barbe-bleue, the ballet La Péri, and his Symphony in C.

Born in Paris on October 1, 1865, into a prosperous banking family of Jewish ancestry, Dukas revealed average musical gifts as a child. He received his earliest training from his mother, a fine pianist, who died during his fifth year. At 16, having made music his chosen vocation, Dukas entered the Paris Conservatoire, studying harmony, piano, conducting, and orchestration. At 17, he wrote his first two adult compositions, overtures to Goethe's Götz von Berlichingen and Shakespeare's King Lear. He formally studied composition with Ernest Guiraud, but his submissions for the Prix de Rome competition in the years 1886 to 1889 were unsuccessful. This was the beginning of his pathological self-doubt that led to the destruction of almost half the total output of his creative maturity. Partly due to these disappointments, he left the school to fulfill his military service, which he completed in 1891.

Dukas then began writing music criticism and resumed composition, entering his most productive compositional phase with the overture Polyeucte, introduced to widespread acclaim on January 23, 1892. During the following year, he abandoned his first projected opera, Horn et Rimenhild, and collaborated with Saint-Saëns in completing and orchestrating the opera Frédégonde by Guiraud. Dukas' Symphony in C, commenced in 1895, recalls the symphonies of Franck, d'Indy, and Chausson, the leading lights in the Societé Nationale de Musique formed to promote French composers, and also emulates those more extroverted French symphonists: Lalo, Bizet, and Saint-Saëns. The most famous work by Dukas, the "symphonic scherzo after Goethe," The Sorcerer's Apprentice, was written in the immediate aftermath of the Symphony, between January and May of 1897. For the next decade, he devoted himself to an opera, Ariane et Barbe-bleue, based on the work of Maurice Maeterlinck, while completing his Sonata for piano in E flat minor (1900). The ballet score La Péri (1911-1912), was originally intended as a one-act tableau for Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. It was the last work Dukas allowed to be submitted for publication and was saved from the ashes only after vigorous protests from the composer's closest associates.

Even as he gained recognition as composer, Dukas became one of the foremost Parisian music critics of his generation, contributing articles and reviews to many of France's leading newspapers and journals. He was also a dedicated musicological researcher, editing authoritative critical editions of keyboard music by Rameau, Couperin, Scarlatti, and Beethoven, and served as a member of the composition faculty at the Paris Conservatoire from 1910 to 1913. Dukas died in Paris on May 17, 1935, without living to see his universal fame established as The Sorcerer's Apprentice became enshrined in American popular culture a mere five years later through the use of the work in the Walt Disney movie Fantasia. ~ TiVo Staff

Armin Jordan has achieved a reputation for a high order of competence in a broad and varied repertory. As director of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande from 1985 to 1997, he found himself in the international spotlight through tours and the numerous recordings he made with the orchestra. He is also likely the only maestro to have acted (Amfortas) in a film (Parsifal) whose soundtrack he was conducting. Indeed, his career entered a new phase through his work as a Wagner conductor at Seattle and in Paris, dispelling notions that his abilities were best confined to the French repertory. After studies in Lausanne and Geneva, Jordan began his career in 1957 in a traditional manner as an assistant conductor at the town theater in Biel. By 1963, he had advanced to principal conductor at the Zürich Opera and remained there until 1968. From 1968 to 1971, he served as principal conductor at the Théâtre de Saint Gall and from 1971 to 1989, he was principal conductor at Basle. From 1973 to 1985, Jordan was also music director of the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra and toured America with that ensemble in 1983. From 1985 to 1997, he served as chief conductor of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in Geneva and devoted himself extensively to that orchestra; under his leadership, the Geneva orchestra toured the United States and Japan on five different occasions. From 1986 to 1993, he also held the position of principal guest conductor of the Ensemble Orchestral de Paris. By the mid-'90s, European opera performances had taken Jordan to Lyon, Nancy, Bordeaux, the Monnaie in Brussels, Munich, Hamburg, and Vienna, as well as to the Grand Théâtre in Geneva. His repertory grew to embrace works by Mozart, Berg, Puccini, Shostakovich, Strauss, and Wagner, as well as Massenet and Debussy. After making his American operatic debut at Seattle in 1985, Jordan conducted at the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York and at the Metropolitan Opera. In August 2000, Jordan collapsed from pneumonia while conducting Wagner's Ring and subsequently withdrew from the company's 2001 Ring. Guest appearances with other symphony orchestras also figured into Jordan's career during and after his years in Geneva. Paris, Holland, Zürich, and Monte Carlo were among the venues visited.