Within two years of its premiere, L’Apprenti sorcier, scherzo d’après une ballade de Goethe (1897) had secured Dukas’s place in the canon, and by the middle of the twentieth century it had eclipsed the rest of his output. Whereas the Symphony in C was bracketed as a work of niche, French finde-siècle appeal, and while performers would protest that the subsequent sonata and opera made impractical demands, listeners and musicians alike clamoured for L’Apprenti sorcier. It melded deft allusions – to the exquisite orchestration in Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894) and Russian programme-music conventions – with a new compositional imagination to captivate even casual listeners. Generations of these encountered the music via a defining moment in its reception history. By courtesy of a central role in the 1940 Disney film Fantasia, L’Apprenti sorcier became indelibly linked with animation, a cinematic form in its infancy during the composer’s lifetime.

In this chapter I call for a theatrical turn in the musicology of Dukas’s mature programmatic oeuvre: strictly speaking, those works comprise only Polyeucte and L’Apprenti sorcier but could be stretched to include the poème dansé La Péri (1910–11). Polyeucte and L’Apprenti sorcier manifest a theatrical consciousness that Dukas theorised in his chroniques musicales and, more comprehensively, conventionally realised in Ariane and La Péri. By approaching L’Apprenti sorcier as ‘theatrical’ (in preference to categorising it as ‘dramatic’), I explore how Dukas ‘staged’ programme music through gestural symphonic action. This analysis is partly motivated by the composer’s writings. Understanding L’Apprenti sorcier as gestural (in the sense that its composer did) invites us to consider it in relation to theatrical forms. Conceptualising the work as gestural (verging on choreographic, corporeal) highlights its links with La Péri. In 1897, however, opera was Dukas’s main interest, and, as I show, he asserted that the symphonic poem and music-drama were sister genres.

Panning across the vista from the late nineteenth-century stage to the twentieth-century theatrical experience as one considers L’Apprenti sorcier, the mind’s eye readily projects the moving images fashioned by the Disney animators. Mickey Mouse donning a sorcerer’s hat for the cartoon short The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is more a corporate logo than a cultural symbol, but this avatar belies Fantasia’s edifying interpretation through the modern theatre of film animation.