A Fairy Tale

Petko Staynov lost his sight at the age of eleven and studied piano and composition in Dresden, returning to Bulgaria in 1924 as one of the first Bulgarians with a full Western conservatory training. A Fairy Tale is one of his symphonic suites, written for large orchestra in the same period as the symphonic poems Legend and Thrace, and it belongs to the effort that defined his generation: to move Bulgarian orchestral music beyond the quotation of folk tunes towards their absorption into symphonic form. He dictated his scores from memory to copyists.