A symphonic journey through childhood, love and the world of adults.
Aleksandra Naumovski Potisk
Music in which the fragility of childhood meets the contradictions of adulthood.
The suite was composed between April and July 2024, commissioned by SNG Opera in balet Ljubljana. The score spans nearly 250 pages and comprises nineteen numbered scenes and an intervening Transition. Its literary inspiration is The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
Instrumentation
2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets in B-flat, 2 bassoons; 2 horns, 2 trumpets in B-flat or C, 2 trombones and tuba; timpani, percussion, harp, celesta and strings.
A child’s perspective is more than innocence. It also holds longing, ideals and the inability to say goodbye.
Although The Little Prince is often classified as children’s literature, its melancholy beauty also speaks to adult readers. The same is true of the suite: the child’s perspective is the starting point, with more complex psychological and emotional processes unfolding beneath it.
The composer’s concept highlights two interconnected strands: love and puer aeternus — the eternal boy. Love permeates the entire narrative, most clearly in the relationship with the Rose. It reflects both the idealised beauty of intimacy and the demands of a real relationship; the composer’s interpretation also links it to the writer’s relationship with his wife Consuelo.
The second strand draws on Marie-Louise von Franz’s Jungian interpretation of The Little Prince. The eternal youth remains attached to freedom, imagination and childhood ideals, while struggling to accept the limitations of everyday life and lasting responsibility towards another person.
In this interpretation, the Pilot and the Little Prince are two sides of the same personality. The plane crash opens up a space of inner disintegration and confrontation: the adult encounters the child within, whom he cannot let go. Idealised love remains in tension with its possible fulfilment in adult life.
The suite’s musical dramaturgy grows out of the composer’s interpretation, connecting love, the archetype of the eternal youth and the inner relationship between the Pilot and the Little Prince.
Overture, introductions, journey and conclusion. An independent Transition is placed between Scenes VI and VII.
Recurring motifs change with the story. Most of the thematic material grows from two principal themes: the Little Prince’s and the Rose’s.
Perfect and diminished fifths
The theme centres on the contrast between a perfect fifth and a diminished fifth, or tritone. Stability and tension are thus present in its basic structure, expressing the conflict between a child’s perspective and the adult world.
Between major and minor
The theme opens with a perfect fourth; a major or minor third then gives it a major- or minor-mode colouring. The same musical material can therefore express the Rose’s tenderness, uncertainty or demanding nature.
A mirror image
The Pilot’s theme is a mirror image that both reflects and extends the Little Prince’s theme. Their musical kinship presents child and adult as two sides of one personality. A falling third after the broad ascent in the Little Prince’s theme provides a further connection.
A chromatic connection
Chromatic elements connect the flight theme with the Pilot’s. In the narrative, flight also carries a longing to transcend limitations. Its role is connective, while the Little Prince and the Rose remain the two principal thematic foundations.
In The Encounter, thematic layers intertwine in an orchestral stretto. The Dream Waltz transforms the Rose’s theme into major, while the finale gradually assembles the Little Prince’s material into a closing C-major sonority. The characters’ musical connections emerge through the return and transformation of familiar material.
The themes undergo changes ranging from individual intervals to harmony and musical form. The contrasts between perfect and diminished fifths and between major and minor thirds expand into a relationship between tonality and atonality. The tension between order and fragmentation follows the characters’ inner conflict.
The Dream Waltz introduces a major-mode transformation of the Rose’s theme. The memory of pure first love initially takes on a cinematic nostalgia; the material then fragments, ending in an incomplete, fragmented period. Musical form itself enacts the loss of idealised intimacy.
The scenes do not always serve a single function. The Desert, the Earth and Asteroid B612 establish settings; the Pilot, the Rose and the planets’ inhabitants portray characters; the Rose Garden, Dream Waltz and Tango function as dances. The Encounter, Transition, Farewell and Finale carry the narrative forward. These functions intertwine throughout the suite.
Composing the suite meant reconciling several demands: the music had to allow for dance, communicate with children and preserve the literary source’s philosophical and psychological depth. The composer therefore combines narrative with symphonic development and symbolic layers that operate beyond the immediate stage action.
The different styles are more than touches of colour. The Rose Garden’s ritornello emphasises recurrence; the waltz evokes a nostalgic memory of innocent love; the tango connects taming with the disciplining of passion. The cinematic nostalgia of the Dream Waltz gradually fragments, while the Earth’s sharply rhythmic fabric, percussion and insistent brass convey the confinement of a world obsessed with business. The music of Asteroid B612 also includes a recognisable children’s taunting motif.
The variety of genres and styles in the “theatre of the adult world” explores human existence in all its contradictions: from the desire for closeness to the hunger for power, from vanity to cold calculation. Each character speaks a distinct musical language; together they portray a world that eludes a child’s understanding and often reveals disturbingly grotesque features. Stylistic diversity thus becomes a way of exploring humanity and its masks.
Harmonic blocks in Messiaen’s fourth mode are connected by a veiled muted-trumpet line in half notes, evoking the ridges of sand dunes. The desert holds stars, a hidden well and revelation, but is also a place of mortal danger and the Snake’s home.
Cheerful, carefree material portrays a microcosm in which everything has its place. It appears three times: in the Overture, in the planet’s own scene, and immediately after the tragic farewell, as the Little Prince returns to his absent yet secure home world.
Harp, celesta and flexatone shape the journey’s sound. Their shimmering, chiming colours suggest scattered stars and boundless space.
A modal brass chorale combines authority with loneliness. An interlude in the form of a galliard introduces the humorous act of moving the throne for the next command to the Sun.
An ever-moving world is marked by bells as the lights are lit. The tempo continually accelerates until the activity becomes an unstoppable cycle.
A trumpet solo flirts with jazz. The exposed solo voice becomes a musical gesture of a character who needs admiration.
Temple blocks take over the counting of stars. The secco rhythms of the orchestra persistently catalogue wealth, creating an unfeeling mechanism of appropriation.
The character is entrusted to the trombone. Its musical gesture physically evokes instability and entrapment in repetition.
The bassoon presents a complete tone row, portraying a scientific, rational order. Emotional warmth emerges only briefly, as the Geographer shows the Little Prince the way to Earth.
Caressing, descending string sequences meet the honking of brass. The scene emphasises anxiety at the world’s oversaturation rather than its natural beauty.
The symphony orchestra imitates a wind band in a ritornello and cancan. A glittering surface accompanies a multitude of roses in which a sense of personal, unrepeatable substance is lost.
The classical dance form recalls the authenticity of falling in love. The Rose’s major-mode theme gradually disintegrates through nostalgia; the ending offers no complete formal closure.
The tango connects taming with the disciplining of passion. Its introduction portrays the shyness of a first approach; its conclusion conveys friendship and familiarity, already signalling the transition to the ending.
The narrative returns to the desert, sunrise and the well. Water is characterised by transparent, polyrhythmic atonal counterpoint in the woodwinds; the Little Prince’s death by a string larghetto with harp in unison.
The musical narrative ends; the literary figure endures.
The Pilot’s self-awareness, repair of the plane and take-off lead to the conclusion of the musical narrative. The transformed Little Prince theme gradually coalesces into a triumphant C-major six-four chord; the closing cadence brings together the full orchestra on a brass foundation. This ending is conceived neither as catharsis nor as the hero’s apotheosis, but as a celebration of the literary masterpiece and the figure of the Little Prince. In the interview, the composer stresses that the closing transformation removes the theme’s initial instability, while the falling third remains a recognisable trace of the Pilot and the Little Prince’s shared thematic world.
Aleksandra Naumovski Potisk’s symphonic suite is the constitutive musical foundation of the ballet The Little Prince, for which Lukas Zuschlag created the choreography. The ballet was staged at SNG Opera in balet Ljubljana (world premiere on 6 September 2024) and HNK Ivana pl. Zajca in Rijeka (premiere on 13 February 2026). The music was recorded in August 2024 at Radio Slovenia’s Studio 26 by the Symphony Orchestra of SNG Opera in balet Ljubljana, conducted by Ayrton Desimpelaere.
LJUBLJANA ↗RIJEKA ↗Through 21 April 2026: 20 in Ljubljana, 2 in Krško and 12 in Rijeka.
| No. | Date | Time | Venue |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 18:00 | SNG Opera in balet LjubljanaLjubljana premiere | |
| 2 | 17:00 | SNG Opera in balet Ljubljana | |
| 3 | 18:30 | SNG Opera in balet Ljubljana | |
| 4 | 10:00 | SNG Opera in balet Ljubljana | |
| 5 | 11:30 | SNG Opera in balet Ljubljana | |
| 6 | 10:00 | SNG Opera in balet Ljubljana | |
| 7 | 11:30 | SNG Opera in balet Ljubljana | |
| 8 | 10:00 | SNG Opera in balet Ljubljana | |
| 9 | 11:30 | SNG Opera in balet Ljubljana | |
| 10 | 10:00 | SNG Opera in balet Ljubljana | |
| 11 | 17:00 | SNG Opera in balet Ljubljana | |
| 12 | 18:30 | SNG Opera in balet Ljubljana | |
| 13 | 11:00 | Kulturni dom Krško | |
| 14 | 18:00 | Kulturni dom Krško | |
| 15 | 17:30 | SNG Opera in balet Ljubljana | |
| 16 | 19:30 | SNG Opera in balet Ljubljana | |
| 17 | 17:30 | SNG Opera in balet Ljubljana | |
| 18 | 19:30 | SNG Opera in balet Ljubljana | |
| 19 | 10:00 | SNG Opera in balet Ljubljana | |
| 20 | 11:45 | SNG Opera in balet Ljubljana | |
| 21 | 10:00 | SNG Opera in balet Ljubljana | |
| 22 | 11:45 | SNG Opera in balet Ljubljana | |
| 23 | 19:30 | HNK Ivana pl. Zajca, RijekaRijeka premiere | |
| 24 | 18:00 | HNK Ivana pl. Zajca, Rijeka | |
| 25 | 12:00 | HNK Ivana pl. Zajca, Rijeka | |
| 26 | 12:00 | HNK Ivana pl. Zajca, Rijeka | |
| 27 | 19:30 | HNK Ivana pl. Zajca, Rijeka | |
| 28 | 18:00 | HNK Ivana pl. Zajca, Rijeka | |
| 29 | 12:00 | HNK Ivana pl. Zajca, Rijeka | |
| 30 | 19:30 | HNK Ivana pl. Zajca, Rijeka | |
| 31 | 12:00 | HNK Ivana pl. Zajca, Rijeka | |
| 32 | 19:30 | HNK Ivana pl. Zajca, Rijeka | |
| 33 | 18:00 | HNK Ivana pl. Zajca, Rijeka | |
| 34 | 19:30 | HNK Ivana pl. Zajca, Rijeka |
19 September 2024 at 19:30 · Season 2024/25 Opening Concert, SNG Opera in balet Ljubljana. This performance of excerpts is listed separately and is not included in the ballet performance total.
Selected photographs from the official galleries of SNG Opera in balet Ljubljana and HNK Ivana pl. Zajca. Select a photograph to enlarge it.
Selected critical responses to the ballet The Little Prince, the source of the symphonic suite. All excerpts are translated into English.
»Alongside the excellent set design and choreography, it is above all the music that enables the ballet to tell the Little Prince’s multilayered story without dialogue.«
»It has been a long time since we had the opportunity to hear such a fine, high-quality musical work from a contemporary composer.«
»Aleksandra Naumovski Potisk’s score shapes motifs that transform in step with the characters’ inner development.«
The score becomes the starting point for an encounter between the work, its performers and its listeners.
For Aleksandra Naumovski Potisk, a completed composition must eventually live independently of its creator. The composer’s intention remains in the score, while performers take responsibility for its realisation in sound. New interpretations do more than repeat an initial idea: they continue the work’s life.
The literary source likewise remains open to new readings. For the composer, The Little Prince is an adventure, a prose poem, a love story, a philosophical narrative and a social critique. Each return to the text reveals new questions.
Based on Aleksandra Naumovski Potisk’s answers for HNK Ivana pl. Zajca on the occasion of the Rijeka production. Material from the interview is incorporated thematically into the presentation of the suite.
For information about the score, performance materials and concert performances of the suite, please contact the composer.
CONTACT THE COMPOSER ↗ANP.SI ↗Content and musical examples based on: the composer’s presentation at anp.si. Production information: SNG Opera in balet Ljubljana and HNK Ivana pl. Zajca.
Music gives them a new space.