The New Tale of Puss in Boots

I was fifty-two when the phone rang. Jana — a classmate from music school, now a piano teacher herself — wanted to know whether she could keep using my pieces with her students. The pieces I’d written in 1988 as my conservatory graduation work.

Music I had completely forgotten about. I had no copy of it — and the manuscript was long gone, lost somewhere in a move. Jana had her photocopy. For all those years she’d taught from it, played it, used it with children. She snapped a photo on her phone and sent it to me in a short email. The pieces still existed — and the music in them was still alive. Not in an archive, not in a drawer. In classrooms. Children were learning to play them; teachers were handing them on. Thirty-six years with no publisher, no recording, no institution behind them.

That’s when it hit me. No review, no prize, no jury could give you a feeling like that: my music lived in classrooms without me. And children took to it.

The suite is called The New Tale of Puss in Boots. Six pieces for piano four hands, each with its own character and its own emotional charge. The first — Puss in Boots — is a bright dixieland march: joyful, sure of itself, with one brief moment of doubt in the middle. The second, The Enchanted Castle, is slow and cold — mystery, solitude, time held still. Sleeping Beauty is a lullaby: calm, tenderness, a quiet grace. The fourth, Midnight Ball, begins by waking the castle from a dream and dissolves into a strange waltz — tension loosens, joy returns. King of the Winds is slow and mystical — the feeling of standing small before something larger. And the sixth, Seven Dwarfs, is a bright, cheerful march that mirrors the first — a glad entrance, a flicker of tension, a farewell. The suite opens and closes on the same lightness — a glad, rhythmic energy that carries you along. That’s no accident. As a child I loved music you could whistle, or hum to your own footsteps.

The suite is dedicated to Monika Pavláková — my teacher at music school. She taught me that the piano is not just an instrument but a path to the soul. Through jazz she showed me freedom, improvisation, rhythm, and passion — and those things live in every one of these six pieces, whether you hear them or not. Monika Pavláková passed away a few years ago. This dedication is a small gesture of thanks that came too late. The craft of the suite was shaped by my composition professor, Stanislav Hochel — whose stoic calm I put thoroughly to the test at eighteen with my own stubbornness, and for whose every correction I’m grateful to this day. He still teaches at the conservatory now, at seventy-five.

When music lives for thirty-six years in other people’s hands and still works, you understand one simple thing. The talent, the schooling, the patience of your teachers — none of it was given to you to put away as a keepsake. You owe the music its proper form. That’s the harmony I’d been looking for all along — not harmony between sounds, but harmony between what I was given and what I can share onward.

So the suite is being published properly for the first time — self-published, in print, by my own hand. I’m finishing the engraving now. Recordings are in preparation, and animated films for each of the six pieces along with them. The edition will carry a QR code with the recordings, right there in the score — so a child doesn’t have to guess how the music sounds from the notation alone. That skill comes, but only with years.

I want to bring this into the world through a campaign on donio.sk. If you’d like to be part of it, now is the time.