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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

Jehan Ariste Alain was born in St. Germain-en-Laye to a musical family headed by his father Albert, who was an organist, composer and organ builder. The elder Alain had built an organ into his own living room and home schooled three of his children (Jehan, Olivier, and Marie-Claire) in the art of playing the "King of Instruments." At age 16, Jehan Alain enrolled in the Paris Conservatoire, where he continued his organ studies with Marcel Dupré, taking composition with Jean Roger-Ducasse and Paul Dukas, and fugue with Georges Caussade. It is Caussade who is said to have had the deepest impact on Alain's own musical personality. Alain studied at the Conservatoire for the next 12 years, taking First Prize in Harmony and Fugue in 1934, and following it with a First Prize in Organ and Improvisation in 1939.

In 1935 he married, and from that time on he made his living playing at two places of worship: the Church of Saint-Nicolas de Maisons-Lafitte, and the synagogue at the Rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth. Like his father, Alain had an organ built into his home; this one had a rank of pedals that split at the center between a pair of divisions: 16' and 8' stops on the first half, and smaller stops on the second. It was on this instrument that he conceived his major mature works: the Trois Danses, Le Jardin suspendu, Litanies, and the Fantasies.

Jehan Alain's short life was difficult. He served in the French Army in 1933 and 1934, during which time he contracted a near-fatal case of pneumonia. His sister Odile was killed in a mountain climbing accident in 1937. At the end of 1939, Alain was mobilized again -- this time in the Eighth Motorized Armored Division -- and he died fighting the Germans in Petit-puy (outside Saumur) on June 20, 1940, at age 29. The manuscript pages of his final work, a full symphonic orchestration of the Trois Danses, were sucked out of the window of a moving train as Alain rode on to his final rendezvous.

In spite of the brevity of his life, Alain produced approximately 120 works. As a whole, his output is strikingly consistent and complete unto itself; scholars of Alain's music have difficulty developing precise dates for many of the works since telltale signs of stylistic development are practically absent from his music. His works sound with one voice, varied, but mature. Alain's music makes extensive use of the church modes, as well as coloristic dissonance. A somewhat rhapsodic approach to rhythm creates an ecstatic building up of bold, colorful and phantasmagoric sections in the Litanies and the Trois Danses that can be tremendously exciting to hear. In Le Jardin suspendu and short works such as the lovely Choral dorien he created smooth, mysterious textures that suggest an otherworldly, even divine, presence.

With his death, France immediately appreciated what she had lost; the first book-length study on Alain's music was published in 1941. In the early '70s, Alain's sister Marie-Claire made the first complete recording of his organ music, and in the digital era, further complete sets have been issued with Kevin Bowyer (Nimbus) and Eric Lebrun (Naxos). Lesser known is a considerable body of Alain's piano music, in addition to some choral music, including two masses, chamber music, and songs.

Olivier Messiaen was a French composer, organist, teacher, and ornithologist whose music is distinguished by his deep devotion to Catholicism, exoticism, and nature. At the age of 11 he entered the Paris Conservatoire, studying organ and improvisation with Marcel Dupré and composition with Paul Dukas. In 1930, he became the principal organist at La Trinité Cathedral in Paris, a post he held for more than 40 years. His distinguished teaching career is marked by appointments in Darmstadt (1950-1953), his famous courses in harmony and analysis at the Paris Conservatoire beginning in 1947, and his appointment as professor of composition there in 1966. His impressive list of students includes Boulez, Stockhausen, and his second wife, keyboardist Yvonne Loriod, among many others.

In synthesizing an individual style, Messiaen discovered in the music of Debussy the properties of "exotic" modes such as the whole-tone and diminished scales, calling them "modes of limited transposition." The inherent symetricalities of these modes enabled Messiaen to create progressions and melodies free of the tonic-dominant polarity of traditional tonal music, while remaining independent of the twelve-tone system as well. Messiaen was gifted with a strong sense of "synaesthesia" or hearing in colors. He often described his music in terms of "color progressions," also equating key signatures and collections (sets) of pitches with specific colors. At an early age, Messiaen developed a strong interest in rhythm, particularly fostered by Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. His rhythmic investigations ranged from Gregorian chant, to ancient Greek poetic meters, to Indian raga, to gamelan music. He soon left regular metric divisions behind, although repetition remained an integral part of his rhythmic vocabulary. All of these elements are explained in great detail in his 1944 publication, Technique de mon langage musical (Technique of my musical language).

In 1940, while a prisoner of war of the Germans, Messiaen composed Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time). The quartet's unique instrumentation of piano, clarinet, violin, and cello was written for, and premiered by Messiaen and three fellow inmates while in detention; it became one of the great chamber works of the twentieth century. Messiaen was one of the first composers to apply serial techniques to parameters other than pitch (such as duration, register, and dynamics) in Mode de valeurs et d'intensités (1949) for solo piano. His interest in plain chant and rhythm led him to the ancient Greeks and Hindus, where he discovered processes such as nonretrogradable, additive, and subtractive rhythms. The Turangalila-symphonie of 1948 is the most synthetic of his early works. It features rich orchestration, imaginative use of tonal colors, Hindu rhythms, and a formal scheme that unfolds in large, block-like structures. Also of note here is one of the earliest uses of the Ondes Martenot, an electronic instrument capable of producing eerie glissandi, as well as monophonic melodies. Messiaen had a deep love of birdsong, and spent much time in the wild making extensive transcriptions, many of which would surface in his works, most notably in an arresting orchestral passage in Chronochromie (1960) and the monumental Catalogue d'oiseaux (Catalog of the Birds) (1958) for solo piano. His large body of organ music, composed primarily during his tenure as organist at the Sainte Trinite Cathedral, is highly idiomatic, colorful in harmony and registration, and rhythmically ingenious. From 1950, his Messe de la Pentecote (Mass of the Pentecost) is a collection of improvisations that he shaped into a composition. His only opera, St. Francis d'Assise, was completed in 1983.

French organist and composer Maurice Duruflé is known for a small number of extraordinary compositions, among which the Requiem is perhaps the finest and most often performed. His works, which, due to his crippling self-criticism, number only 14, are based on Gregorian chant. Characteristically, these melodies, which retain their original suppleness, are surrounded by complex modal harmonies that are generated by an intricate web of polyphony.

Duruflé was born in Louviers in Normandy, France. At the age of ten, he entered the choir school at the Rouen cathedral, where he studied piano, organ, and theory with Jules Haelling. It is during this time that Duruflé developed his affinity for Gregorian chant. He moved to Paris in 1919 and studied with Charles Tournemire, organist at St. Clotilde, where Duruflé later became his assistant. He also later became the assistant of Louis Vierne at Notre Dame. In 1920, Duruflé entered the Paris Conservatoire and studied organ with Eugène Gigout, harmony with Jean Gallon, accompaniment with Estyle, counterpoint and fugue with Georges Caussade, and composition with Paul Dukas. At the Conservatoire, Duruflé took first prizes in the areas of organ, harmony, accompaniment, counterpoint and fugue, and composition. In 1929, he won a prize from the Amis de l'Orgue for interpretation and improvisation.

In 1930, he was appointed to the position of organist at St. Etienne-du-Mont, which he held for the remainder of his life, sharing the appointment with his wife after 1953. That same year, he was again honored by the Amis de l'Orgue, this time for his Prelude, adagio et choral varié sur le "Veni Creator," Op. 4. In 1936, Duruflé received the Blumenthal Foundation Prize. He became Dupré's assistant for the organ class at the Paris Conservatoire in 1943. He was also appointed professor of harmony, a position that he held until 1969. The Duruflé Requiem was premiered in 1947 by Desormière. In addition, Duruflé was a highly esteemed organist, and he toured extensively throughout Europe and North America. His performing career was ended by an automobile accident in May 1975 that left him virtually bedridden until his death in 1986. ~ Stephen Kingsbury