Dukas' final significant work, the 20-minute ballet La Péri (subtitled "Poème dansé") was written for dancer N. Truhanova and was premiered by her on a program that also included dances to Schmitt's La tragédie de Salomé, d'Indy's Istar, and Ravel's Valses nobles et sentimentales (here retitled Adélaide). La Péri fit perfectly in this company, with its dreamy manipulation of two exotic themes in an orchestration Dukas intended to resemble "a kind of translucent, dazzling enamel." This is Dukas' most Impressionistic score, with the primary themes used as vehicles for explorations of mood and timbre. The orchestra can make a powerful noise in the work's many passionate sections, but at least half the score is given over to quiet washes of strings and delicate swirls of woodwinds, with Middle Eastern flavor provided by a few extra percussion instruments, notably the tambourine. In the story, which is based on an ancient Persian legend, Iskender (Alexander the Great) at last finds the Flower of Immortality in the hand of a sleeping Péri, or fairy. Iskender snatches the flower, which distresses the now wide-awake Péri; without it, she cannot serve Ormuzd, the god of light. Iskender becomes aroused by the Péri, who performs a seductive dance while the Flower of Immortality causes Iskender's face to glow red with desire. Realizing himself unworthy, he willingly hands back the flower; with it, the Péri rises into the light while Iskender recedes into the shadows and, presumably, death. The score begins with a regal, questing brass fanfare in ternary form, a piece written, and often played, separately. The dance music itself falls into three parts. The first opens with shimmering strings and mysterious horn calls, leading to variations on Iskender's sinuous, ever surging-and-receding theme. A mysterious transition leads to the second part, the Péri's dance, which is really a set of variations on her own more ecstatic theme. Dukas then developed the two themes together, eventually bringing them to a shattering climax. The final part is a brief epilog in which the Péri's theme, now dreamy and increasingly distant, mingles for the last time with Iskender's, which is now much calmer and broader than it initially was. The music dies away into the muted horn calls of the beginning.

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Dukas' final significant work, the 20-minute ballet La Péri (subtitled "Poème dansé") was written for dancer N. Truhanova and was premiered by her on a program that also included dances to Schmitt's La tragédie de Salomé, d'Indy's Istar, and Ravel's Valses nobles et sentimentales (here retitled Adélaide). La Péri fit perfectly in this company, with its dreamy manipulation of two exotic themes in an orchestration Dukas intended to resemble "a kind of translucent, dazzling enamel." This is Dukas' most Impressionistic score, with the primary themes used as vehicles for explorations of mood and timbre. The orchestra can make a powerful noise in the work's many passionate sections, but at least half the score is given over to quiet washes of strings and delicate swirls of woodwinds, with Middle Eastern flavor provided by a few extra percussion instruments, notably the tambourine. In the story, which is based on an ancient Persian legend, Iskender (Alexander the Great) at last finds the Flower of Immortality in the hand of a sleeping Péri, or fairy. Iskender snatches the flower, which distresses the now wide-awake Péri; without it, she cannot serve Ormuzd, the god of light. Iskender becomes aroused by the Péri, who performs a seductive dance while the Flower of Immortality causes Iskender's face to glow red with desire. Realizing himself unworthy, he willingly hands back the flower; with it, the Péri rises into the light while Iskender recedes into the shadows and, presumably, death. The score begins with a regal, questing brass fanfare in ternary form, a piece written, and often played, separately. The dance music itself falls into three parts. The first opens with shimmering strings and mysterious horn calls, leading to variations on Iskender's sinuous, ever surging-and-receding theme. A mysterious transition leads to the second part, the Péri's dance, which is really a set of variations on her own more ecstatic theme. Dukas then developed the two themes together, eventually bringing them to a shattering climax. The final part is a brief epilog in which the Péri's theme, now dreamy and increasingly distant, mingles for the last time with Iskender's, which is now much calmer and broader than it initially was. The music dies away into the muted horn calls of the beginning.

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In many regards, the nineteenth century fin de siècle persisted in Paris until the outbreak of World War I in 1914—an era of unprecedented, if derivative, opulence. The enormous shadow Wagner cast over the 1870s and 1880s had begun to give way to more subtly enticing, exotic influences—Javanese gamelan at the Paris Exposition of 1889, which so took Debussy, the "quiet revolution" of Debussy himself, the revelation of the Russians—Glinka, Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, Borodin, Balakirev, Mussorgsky, and Cui—piquantly poised between East and West to acquire renewed popularity with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, established in Paris in 1909. Even in the hothouse atmosphere of Old Europe's last extravagant decade, the evening of April 22, 1912, at the Théâtre du Châtelet must have been one of the most exquisitely coruscating, featuring Florent Schmitt's glowing, glowering, overloaded "mimodrama," La Tragédie de Salomé, Ravel's orchestration of his Valses nobles et sentimentales as a ballet, Adélaïde ou le langage des fleurs, d'Indy's chastely ecstatic Istar, and the premiere of the reticent Paul Dukas' last significant—and finest—work, the poème dansé, La Péri, each conducted by its respective composer and danced by the legendary Natasha Trukhanova. Among these masters of orchestral virtuosity, Dukas was not the least—after the fulsome cleverness of Schmitt, Ravel's elegance, and the calculated pâleur of d'Indy, the seemingly infinite ways in which Dukas' orchestral fabric—woven with almost chamber music-like intricacy—becomes a living body of sinuous, sensuous orientalizing must have loomed as a ne plus ultra, the apotheosis of two generations of French musicians' preoccupation with the East going back to Félicien David's Le Désert of 1844. To have preceded such sumptuousness with the brilliantly contrasting Fanfare for brass choir alone proved a masterstroke: an electrifying rappel à l'ordre as the instrumental groups, antiphonally and in burnished harmony, blazon a magnificent peremptory flourish self-evidently part of yet transcending the hackneyed genre. Though it has no thematic connection with the ballet, the occasional parallel chords of the Fanfare's central section not only token Dukas' absorption of Debussy but forecast the suavely undulating atmosphere with which La Péri is suffused. A brief reprise of the opening, rounded with a grandly trilling cadence, heralds like the sun at zenith the legendary twilight of this "danced poem." Incredibly, the Fanfare was an afterthought almost certainly prompted by the glittering occasion of its premiere. Though he lived on until 1936, Dukas published only a song and a brief piano piece, a eulogy for Debussy.

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