Dukas's Sorcerer's Apprentice, from Lucian to Goethe

A broom that carries water and will not stop: the ancient roots of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, from Lucian's tale to Goethe's ballad and Paul Dukas.

Few orchestral pieces tell a story as clearly as Paul Dukas's L'Apprenti sorcier. Composed in 1897 and conducted by the composer on 18 May of that year in Paris, at the Société nationale de musique, the «symphonic scherzo» turned a ballad by Goethe into music. The story, however, is much older: it goes back to a Greek author of the second century AD and travels through seventeen centuries before reaching, in the twentieth century, the cinema screen.

The Tale of Lucian of Samosata

The oldest source is the Philopseudes, The Lover of Lies, a satirical dialogue by Lucian of Samosata. In it a group of learned men exchange tales of wonders, and one of them, Eucrates, tells how he travelled in Egypt with Pancrates, a sage from Memphis. Pancrates, according to the story, could turn a pestle or a broom into a servant, which carried water and did the household chores.

One day Eucrates, who had secretly overheard the formula, tried to repeat the wonder, but did not know how to stop it. The pestle went on carrying water until the house was flooded. In despair, Eucrates split it in two with an axe, and both halves began carrying water. Only the return of Pancrates put an end to the disaster. Lucian, sceptical of superstitions, uses the story to mock the credulity of his characters.

Goethe's Ballad

In 1797, the year remembered in Germany as the year of ballads for the output of Goethe and Schiller, Goethe wrote Der Zauberlehrling, The Sorcerer's Apprentice. It faithfully takes up Lucian's plot, but moves it to a European setting and turns it into a story between an old master and his impatient pupil. The broom carries buckets of water, the apprentice forgets the word to stop it, splits it with a hatchet and the pieces multiply.

In the end the master returns and with a few words restores order, reminding us that spirits should be summoned only by those who know how to govern them. In Germany the ballad became almost a proverb, quoted whenever someone unleashes forces he can no longer control, and its meaning was extended to politics, technology and science.

Dukas's Symphonic Poem

Dukas follows the ballad step by step. A mysterious introduction describes the sorcerer's workshop and his magic; then the apprentice speaks the spell and the broom sets off, depicted by a hopping theme given to the bassoons. The music grows in ever more agitated waves, until a sharp stroke from the orchestra represents the hatchet splitting the broom. After a brief silence the fragments come back to life, doubled.

At the height of the chaos, the brass announce the master's return, and the piece closes with the atmosphere of the opening. Dukas was extremely severe with himself and destroyed many of his compositions, but this one remained the most famous. He taught for many years at the Paris Conservatoire, where his pupils included Olivier Messiaen.

In 1940 Walt Disney chose The Sorcerer's Apprentice for the film Fantasia, with Mickey Mouse as the apprentice and Leopold Stokowski conducting. Since then, for millions of people, Lucian's broom has the shape of a cartoon, and Dukas's music has become the sound image of magic slipping out of control.