Terez Rose
Ask someone who’s seen the 1940 animated film, Fantasia, which piece they best remember, and the majority will respond with, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice or “the one with Mickey Mouse.” (Runners up might include Bach’s Toccata and Fugue, Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers,” or Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, but that’s an essay for another time.)
Now ask those who chose The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, first, if they know who the composer was, and second, what else he composed.
Yeah. Trickier.
Since childhood, I’ve always loved Fantasia and its treatment of 19th-century French composer Paul Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. It’s mysterious, fun, spooky, with shadows and dramatic lighting (the wonderful cinematic touch of the shadow of Mickey’s oversized mouse ears growing ever bigger against the wall are like something out of a Hitchcock film). There’s the cuteness of the magically created servant broom with its jaunty marching steps, as it quickly takes to his task of filling and dumping water buckets, which becomes horrifically ominous later on. I love the minute attention given to physical detail, like the aforementioned shadows, the wooden table, the smooth stone steps. These were the days of sublime animation, surely a labor of love as well as a well-honed craft for the crew at Disney. And the music—oh how perfectly the music matches the story. (And remember, the music came first, by more than sixty years.)
Let’s give it a watch. (The introduction is in Spanish but this is the right video, I promise!)
It doesn’t help Dukas’ case that he was a perfectionist who abandoned or destroyed any composition that he judged to fall short of his high standards. There are a dozen or so compositions of his that remain, but in concert halls they are rarely heard beyond the wildly popular Sorcerer’s Apprentice (or L’Apprenti Sorcier in his native French) of 1897. » Read More
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2024/09/paul-dukas-sorcerers-apprentice-mouse-terez-rose.html