The Sorcerer's Apprentice (Dukas) Romantic genre of programmatic music, which composers like Franz Liszt, Claude Debussy, Jean Sibelius and Richard Strauss increasingly explored as an alternative to earlier symphonic forms. Unlike other tone poems, such as "La mer" by Debussy or "Finlandia" by Sibelius, Dukas's work is, like works such as "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks" by Strauss, descriptively programmatic, closely following the events described in the Goethe poem. It was customary, in fact, to publish the poem as part of the orchestral score. The instrumentation of the piece consists of two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two soprano clarinets and bass clarinet, three bassoons
The Sorcerer's Apprentice cartoon scenery machine and getting himself into a big heap of trouble. Like the "Fantasia" segment, there is no dialogue, save for a line by Buster in the end. There is a live action film, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" (2010), featuring a scene based on Goethe's poem (and the "Fantasia" version), produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and starring Nicolas Cage. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels alluded to Goethe's poem in "The Communist Manifesto", comparing modern bourgeois society to "the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells." The