Paul Dukas (born October 1, 1865, Paris, France – died May 17, 1935, Paris, France) was a French composer, critic, scholar and teacher.
He was born into a French-Jewish family and studied at the Conservatoire de Paris with
Théodore Dubois and
Ernest Guiraud, where he became close friends with
Claude Debussy. He wrote a fair amount of music, but being a perfectionist and intensely self-critical, he destroyed many of his works, so that only a few of his compositions remain. He died in 1935 and was interred, alongside numerous other composers, in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.