I haven’t heard Sergei Prokofiev's "musical tale" Peter and the Wolf since my childhood until it came to my attention recently. To my astonishment the profound effects of this piece carry on today. I was delighted with the works imagination and its unpretentious approach. Thus a driving desire developed to compose an equivalent for a similarly manageable instrumentation. And thus the aim of composing something which might attract equally, both young and old, like the Prokofiev, and without using popular and ingratiating means developed. Erich Kästners children's books did the same in literacy. In the present cultural-political-social situation it seems to me that there only a few important new pieces anything other than just these "little stories".
After searching a long time I finally found Rudyard Kipling's unconventional, for his own children written The Elephant's Child from the Just So Stories (1902).This was a tale of an outsider developing to a pioneer, bright-clear, seriously and funny, formally happened in a circular motion.
Folded closely with the text, How the Elephant Got Its Trunk changes again and again the narrative pace whereby the text-music relations are created throughout differently (simultaneously or mutually reacting one on the other). The protagonists of the story are indicated through associated sound ciphers, so that the work is crossed by a compact net from concise motives related to certain instruments; thereby for example the main character of the elephant's child is represented by the trumpet, or the advantage of the trunk then by its absent muted trumpet. Changing surroundings and situations retroact and thus change the characters or their appearance. Also I did not deter from a certain kind of illustrative, but it was important for me that the musical is not effete in something like an image, because the reception power and the abstraction potency of children are quite more comprehensive.
To make children familiar with the instruments of the orchestra however, it seems to me no longer to be a sufficient motivation for such a composition in the recent era of very early musical education and very various mass media. I feel it is very important that the facilitation of the current and unassailable word-sound experience uses its full connectivity, as it has already made Prokofiev so inimitable and almost singular. Therefore I pay reverence to Prokofiev's Peter by letting this work "peep out" later toward the end of my piece.
(Many thanks to Uwe Grodd!)