Dukas published only one symphony but solidified his reputation as a symphonic thinker over the next decade with L’Apprenti sorcier, the Piano Sonata in E♭ minor (1899–1900) and Ariane. While symphonic ideology coloured responses to the opera problematically (an issue addressed in Chapter 5), it proved quite apt for a four-movement sonata of approximately forty-five minutes’ duration. But as a piano work the sonata is more obviously grouped with two others for that instrument: Variations, interlude et finale sur un thème de J-Ph. Rameau (composed 1899–1902) and Prélude élégiaque sur le nom de Haydn (1909). All three overtly engage with keyboard history by responding to Baroque, Classical, Romantic or contemporary styles. The sonata and Variations reflect Dukas’s immersion in fin-de-siècle Parisian piano culture, which we glimpse through his writings on concert programming, individual performers and interpretive styles. Other columns enlighten readers on efforts to recuperate French Baroque tradition for the twentieth century. Jacques Durand played a role by spearheading the complete edition of Rameau’s oeuvre, to which Dukas contributed four ballets (1901) and selections from the opera Les Indes galantes (1902) shortly before Durand published his Variations. Although a relationship therefore exists between that score and the Rameau project, the composer’s Revue hebdomadaire critiques reveal that the motivation for the Variations (and sonata) predates his editorial role and lies in a broader set of aesthetic concerns.

Unusually, for turn-of-the-century French piano music, Dukas’s two major works are distinguished by a preoccupation with Beethoven. Not for him ‘impressionist’ titles evoking moods or atmospheres, nor evidence of what Roy Howat calls the ‘thoroughly visual thinking’ of a work like Debussy’s ‘Reflets dans l’eau’ or the ‘visual choreography’ of Ravel’s Ma mère l’Oye. Whereas Chopin’s legacy permeated the music of his peers, and even the piano lessons Dukas took as a teenager with the former Chopin pupil George Mathias, he resisted this cultural inheritance. In 1900 he ventured that the Polish composer’s art was ‘based on ordinary ideas’ and ‘marred by Italian mannerism’ but elevated by ‘the liberty and complexity of the harmonic framework’. Notwithstanding these reservations, Dukas recognised Chopin as embodying a pivotal moment in piano history. Mechanical advances having rendered new Erard and Pleyel instruments much more responsive, expressive and sonorous than their predecessors, the Polish composer, Dukas explained, ‘arrived at the point where this supple organism could better accommodate a wholly new and marvellously rich harmonic language’.