The
Sorcerer’s Apprentice
Duration: 12'
Publisher: Public Domain
KSO played: 2010, 1999
It is a determined and rarefied individual who can listen to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice without once
thinking of Mickey Mouse. With the
possible exception of his debut, the sequence from Fantasia is by far his most famous outing. Walt Disney bought the film rights for
Dukas’s music in 1937, and the resulting cartoon made what was up to then a
reasonably popular piece into a wildly successful one.
Disney’s scheme was a grand one.
He envisaged not simply a film, but what we would now call a multi-media
event. Actors, lighting and technology
were to be employed in theatres to create an immersive experience (which
perhaps marks the root of the idea that became Disneyland). New sequences would be added over the years
so that it would constantly evolve.
Plans to shoot the film in widescreen and partly in 3-D came to nothing,
but Leopold Stokowski’s recordings comprise one of the very first film
soundtracks in stereo.
So high is the regard in which Fantasia
is now held that it is easy to forget that on its release in 1940 it was a
box-office flop and largely dismissed as a pretentious folly. The film’s failure meant that Walt Disney’s
vision of an evolving film never happened.
When Disney Studios finally produced a sequel some sixty years later, it
consisted of all-new animations, except for one: Mickey Mouse’s disastrous
conjuring trick was simply too iconic to leave out.
Fantasia
may have put the music indelibly into popular consciousness, but the credit for
the plot must go to Goethe. His 1797
ballad Der Zauberlehrling tells the
tale of a sorcerer who leaves his workshop and instructs his apprentice to do
his chores. Bored with fetching water by
pail, the apprentice decides to use magic to bring his broom to life to do the
work for him. Unfortunately he does not
know how to make it stop and the workshop is soon flooded. His attempt to solve the problem with an axe
leads to further disaster: each splinter of the broom become a new broom, all
of them marching unstoppably.
Fortunately the sorcerer returns and casts the spell necessary to bring
everything back to rights. The poem ends with the sorcerer’s warning that
raising powerful spirits is a matter only for a master.
Paul Dukas’s tone-poem dates from precisely a century later, in
1897. Dukas is now considered something
of a one hit wonder, but holds a more important place in the history of French
music than this might suggest. He was a
contemporary of Debussy and taught a number of distinguished pupils including
Messiaen and Rodrigo. He also, like
Debussy, made a successful career as an insightful critic. His music is beautifully crafted and shows a
sensibility highly attuned to the cutting edge of his time, but little of it
survives: an extreme sense of perfectionism led him to destroy most of his own
works
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