The Smoldering Progressive

Pity Paul Dukas. For most listeners—even serious music lovers—his work is the mere soundtrack to the anthropomorphic avatars of the Disney corporation. Despite floating in the same fragrant creative broth of early 20th-century Paris as Igor Stravinsky and Claude Debussy he has been rather overshadowed by both, to say nothing of his twelve-tone contemporaries in Vienna. Dukas’ harmonies, orchestration, and adventurous gender politics were radical for his time, but his fairy-tale opera “Ariane et Barbe-bleu,” for instance, plays second fiddle to that other collaboration with Maeterlinck, Debussy’s “Pelleas et Melisande.” His audacious 1912 Poème dansé “La Péri” has been eclipsed by other Diaghilev ballets: Stravinsky’s “Firebird” and “Petrushka.”