PAUL DUKAS’ THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE — Part Two
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is the only segment of Fantasia that features a star out of Disney’s – literal! – “stable” of cartoon performers. Originally it was to showcase Snow White’s Dopey but had been recast with Mickey Mouse in the lead role (although he did wear Dopey’s costume, including his recalcitrant coat sleeve). But a mouse apprenticing to a human sorcerer? And looking every inch of three feet tall? Very peculiar! Even Stokowski himself tried diplomatically to persuade Disney to create a new title character for this segment, a more “everyman” type. Apparently Walt regarded Mickey as everyman enough even though he is a rodent. However, mine is really just a niggling reservation when one considers how perfectly this telling of the story is accomplished.
Surprising also is that Walt approved complicity by his dear mouse in one of the film’s most violent episodes: the splintering of the broom. After investing that instrument with one of those much-desired personalities – a kind of jaunty cocksure worker, enthusiastic and tireless – as well as an appearance that included one of Walt’s favorite physical attributes, a cute little tush, he allowed this charmer to be chopped into smithereens by an axe-wielding Mickey. The violence is actually emphasized by having the whole picture go momentarily black-and-white as though the life had been expunged out of it as well. As the mouse relinquishes his weapon, he heaves a sigh of relief and slumps back against the door that hides his dreadful deed. For many contemporaries this episode may have brought to mind the scandalous 1892 double murder of her parents by Lizzie Borden, a crime immortalized in a popular jump-rope-skipping rhyme:
Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.
Early on, Mickey’s penchant for “playful” cruelty – like, for example, squeezing a goose for a bagpipe in Steamboat Willie – was perhaps “all in good fun”, but the mouse’s murderous panic in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice represented a new and shocking behavior.
By the end of the ’30s, Walt’s alter-ego Mickey was becoming a problem: his popularity was waning. The little rodent had been straightjacketed by a decade of what narrowed down to a bland inoffensive do-gooder personality. The studio’s logo character had started to become eclipsed by others in that star-studded stable, especially the irascible Donald Duck whose temper tantrums seemed a bottomless well of amusement for the general public. Fantasia’s onscreen emcee, composer/musicologist Deems Taylor in his 1940 book about the film suggested that The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was intended to be Mickey’s big come-back, though other reliable sources deny this.
Apocryphal or not, Deems’ assertion seems to be backed up by the fact that the mouse was given a make-over especially for his appearance in Fantasia. Animator Fred Moore, whose acknowledged specialty was “adorability” and animate-able human female forms, re-outfitted the little rodent with a pleasantly pear-shaped body and eyes with pupils.
Originally Mickey’s design was based on a conjunction of circles: one for the head, one for the belly, two for the ears, all easily animated. Artists drawing him actually traced these circles around quarters and dimes as guides. Within the head circle, two additional smaller conjoined circles denoted his eyes, forming the sharp widow’s peak between them, with a black dot in the middle of each for pupils.
Mickey’s new expressive eyes were actually pupils inside these pupils! Those black dots were now encompassed by white ovals surrounded by the original white pupils, those two white facial circles with the widow’s peak between them.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is the only piece in Fantasia retained in its entirety and unaltered in any way. Dukas’ 1897 composition, his sole work to maintain a secure place in the enduring classical symphonic repertoire, was based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 14-stanza poetic ballad Der Zauberlehrling (The Apprentice Magician) written exactly 100 years before Dukas’ tone poem. Subtitled “A Scherzo on a Ballade of Goethe”, the music adheres loosely to that form, a fast light-hearted triple-meter structure (usually coupled with a middle section called a trio.) In Italian, the word scherzo means “joke”. Often a scherzo/trio comprises the third movement of a full symphony, intended to provide a gay little respite from the more serious movements before and after it. Dukas’ scherzo is independent from any larger composition. In this case, the word seems more to denote the tenor of the piece than to describe its musical structure. There is no trio involved.
Several distinctive themes intertwine to recount Goethe’s story musically: a serene mystical one for the sorcerer’s magic, a fanfare-like one for the apprentice’s appropriation of that magic, a march-like one for the broom’s enlistment as water-carrier, a cascading one for the splashing flow of water. Over the course of his 11-minute composition, Dukas repeats, varies, re-orchestrates and intensifies these themes brilliantly throughout. And Disney expertly matches the visuals to them superlatively illustrating the story and actually clarifying the complexity of the music.
