Opera had been central to Dukas’s world from an early age, with the Conservatoire schooling him in theatrical practices via the Prix de Rome contests. As a critic from the early 1890s he started philosophising about opera – its stylistic evolution, status in French culture and other issues. In this chapter I explore his mature creative and critical engagements with opera. He completed a single composition in the genre (Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, 1907) but dabbled with other projects intermittently for over twenty years.

A large part of his twenties and early thirties was spent in striving to emulate Wagner while simultaneously trying to write an original music-drama. From this inherently contradictory position the resulting efforts never satisfied, leading him to abandon two projects in the 1890s (Horn et Rimenhild and L’Arbre de science). These experiences coloured his critical perspective. A breakthrough came in 1899 with the acquisition of compositional rights to Maurice Maeterlinck’s Ariane. The opera premiered at the Opéra-Comique on 10 May 1907, when the music (although not the drama) was celebrated by French critics. The score borrowed from Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) – another Maeterlinck opera imbued with symbolism and a modern French harmonic language – but is also redolent of d’Indy’s lesser-known Fervaal (1895), the French Parsifal ‘ that Dukas lauded as the ‘first-born of French symphonic drama’. After Ariane a second opera was on the cards, but by 1910 Le Nouveau Monde was shelved; it never progressed beyond now-lost score sketches and a libretto. Distractions were myriad: the composer was preoccupied with international performances of Ariane, attending rehearsals for the 1909 Belgian premiere at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie and in 1910 assisting with preparations for the work’s 1911 debut at the Metropolitan Opera, New York. Around the same time, the arrival of the Ballets Russes in Paris generated a ripple effect through the French music scene with Ravel, Debussy and Dukas forsaking opera for ballet over the next few years. Shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, Dukas returned to a project begun in 1899 as an operatic adaptation of Shakespeare’s Tempest. Having relegated it to the back burner for over a decade, he experimented with rewriting it in different genres before losing interest altogether.