Paul Dukas (1 October 1865 – 17 May 1935) was a French composer of classical music. Dukas was born Paul Abraham Dukas in Paris to a Jewish family and studied, under Théodore Dubois and Ernest Guiraud among others, at the Conservatoire there, where he was a friend of Claude Debussy. After completing his studies he found work as an orchestrator and critic. Although Dukas wrote a fair amount of music, he destroyed many of his pieces out of dissatisfaction with them, and only a few remain.