Par l'oubli du moi

Many of Paul Dukas's contemporaries ranked him among the finest composers of his era. His output was perhaps the slimmest of any composer ever to have earned such a distinction, counting but a small handful of major compositions, a symphony, the symphonic poem L'Apprenti sorcier, the opera Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, the ballet La Peri, and a piano sonata among them. Dukas held himself to the most rigorous of standards and possessed a remorseless, even paralyzing, sense of self-criticism that appears to have intensified over his career. After 1912, he completed just a handful of small pieces. He did begin and sporadically work on several major projects, including another symphony, but these became victims of doubt and found their way into his fireplace before his death in 1935. It thus came to pass that Dukas joined Franck, Lalo, and Chausson in the ranks of French composers who left just a single symphony.

Composed in 1895, the Symphony in C premiered on January 3, 1897, under the conductor Paul Vidal, its dedicatee, at the Concerts de l'Opéra, which ran at the eponymous institution from 1895 to 1897. Officially, this Sunday-afternoon series sought to offer an alternative to the Grands concerts that placed greater emphasis on music by emerging French composers. “At least half of [each] concert program,” declared the directors, would be devoted to giving these young musicians “the opportunity to have their works heard, at no cost to them”.