Paul Dukas was a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French music critic and composer whose small body of orchestral works might be forgotten today were it not for Walt Disney and the renowned conductor Leopold Stokowski. When Disney teamed up with Stokowski in the late 1930s to produce the then path-breaking cartoon movie Fantasia – a melding of classical music and sometimes surreal visual imagery – one of the pieces they chose for the film was Dukas's “The Sorcerer's Apprentice.” Thanks to Mickey Mouse, this lively scherzo, and the tale that it accompanied, became the centerpiece of the movie.

Based on a narrative poem by the German literary giant Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the story concerns a great and powerful sorcerer who leaves home for the day and instructs his apprentice (Mickey) to keep watch over things in his absence. The hard-working apprentice is frustrated, however, by the drudge work he is expected to do (like cleaning the house), and he soon hits on the idea of using some of the sorcerer's magic to conjure a helper.