A pupil at the Paris Conservatoire, Dukas, a friend of Debussy, was a gifted and atypical musician who was a music critic. He is best known for his Sorcerer's Apprentice (immortalised by Disney in Fantasia). It was in 1907 that Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, his only opera, was successfully premiered at the Opéra Comique with the librettist Debussy - whose influence some denounced as a little too visible and with whom he shared a taste for orchestration. In reality, Dukas appropriated a technique dear to Wagner, the leitmotif that enabled him to characterise his characters through music, but with a language all his own: rich in sonorities and colours, highly evocative when it came to making the listener feel the atmosphere of Bluebeard's Castle. Long forgotten, the work resonates today with a very contemporary echo: composed mainly for women's roles, it is more than feminist, raising the question of freedom as a universal notion.