Throughout this book I have tried to show that criticism played a major role in Dukas’s creative career. His columns in the Revue hebdomadaire and elsewhere demanded that he reflect and theorise on the musical and cultural currents of fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century Paris in ways that would inevitably guide his development as a composer and, on occasion, as a more literary author. Of the latter, his surviving texts are the Péri prose poem, the Méduse libretto, additions to the Ariane libretto and the ‘Victory’ gala scenario; we could also list the Tempest translation. These literary efforts were sparked by a compositional impetus and regarded by Dukas as vital to the integrity of his planned theatrical works. While they are relatively few but diverse in substance and style, their import exceeds their contribution to finished works or potential for musical development. By profiling Dukas as a figure of respectable writerly inclination and talent, in a partial sense they form the metaphorical glue between his scores and essays. They reinforce the latent bonds between what has traditionally been recognised as an artistic vocation (composition) and what is ostensibly a more academic function (criticism). Yet for individuals such as Dukas, writing was partly a creative calling too.

Criticism was, for him, a means of thinking musically, a mode of imaginatively engaging with history and contemporary movements. At first, as we saw in Chapter 1, it facilitated a honing of artistic identity and influences. Criticism soon made Dukas answerable as a composer to readers and listeners. The extensive discourse on the symphony in the early 1890s established the parameters of his subsequent contribution to the genre. As outlined in Chapter 2, the success of the Symphony in C, albeit not widely affirmed until a few years later, validated him as a commentator in this regard. Likewise, his copious writings on music and literature, programme music and comedy in music all constituted, to an extent, a conceptual premise for L’Apprenti sorcier. Dukas’s immediate triumph with this work, explored in Chapter 3, served to legitimise his philosophy of programme music. From that vantage point he could authoritatively challenge Strauss’s experiments in this domain. Chapter 4 focused on how the major piano works (the sonata and Variations) engaged with a Parisian performance culture that embraced new French repertoire but was embedded in a tradition rooted in Baroque keyboard practices.