Fairytale Poem

Program notes

About the Work

Fairytale Poem began as music for the radio. In 1971 Sofia Gubaidulina wrote the score for a children’s radio programme based on “The Little Piece of Chalk”, a story by the Czech writer Miloš Macourek. She later said that she liked the tale so much, and found it so symbolic of an artist’s fate, that she came to have a very personal relationship with the piece. It has had a second life in the concert hall as a short work for orchestra.

The story, as the composer retold it, goes like this. A little piece of chalk, the kind used for writing on a blackboard, dreams of drawing marvellous castles, beautiful gardens with pavilions, and the sea. Instead it is made to write dull words, numbers and geometric figures, day after day. The children in the classroom grow bigger; the chalk grows smaller. It begins to despair of ever drawing the sun or the sea. At last it is too small to be of use and is thrown away. It finds itself in complete darkness and believes it has died. But the darkness is only the inside of a boy’s pocket. The boy takes the chalk out into the daylight and starts to draw on the pavement: castles, gardens with pavilions, the sea and the sun. The chalk is so happy that it does not notice it is wearing away to nothing as it draws.

Gubaidulina, whose early music had been censured by the Soviet cultural authorities, heard in it a story about an artist. The orchestra’s introduction to the concert calls the piece a humorous fairy tale, and it is that too: light on its feet, brief and full of character.

What to Listen For

You can follow the tale without a text. Listen for how the music is built from small, distinct instrumental voices that come forward one at a time, more like characters in a story than themes in a symphony.

One writer on the piece points to a jazzy fugue for plucked strings, begun by the double bass, among the adventures along the way, and to the ending, where after a last bloom of orchestral colour the music dissolves into silence. That close matches the end of the story, in which the chalk disappears into its own drawing.