“So I lived my life alone, without anyone that I could really talk to, until I had an accident with my plane in the Desert of Sahara, six years ago. Something was broken in my engine. And as I had with me neither a mechanic nor any passengers, I set myself to attempt the difficult repairs all alone. It was a question of life or death for me: I had scarcely enough drinking water to last a week! The first night, then, I went to sleep on the sand, a thousand miles from any human habitation. I was more isolated than a shipwrecked sailor on a raft in the middle of the ocean.” Thus begins Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince, translated into English by Katherine Woods). Is there anyone who does not know this story? The enchanting fairy tale by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry has been translated into many languages and is famous worldwide, beloved by generations of readers. The German composer Peter Wittrich has evocatively captured the work’s characters, fairytale scenes, and humanistic, emotional, and spiritual message through music.
Peter Wittrich (*1959) was born in the north-Bavarian town Freising. He studied composition at the Munich Academy of Music under Dieter Acker. Already while he was a student, his compositions began to win awards including first prize at the International Organ Festival in Erding in 1985 for the organ composition Fantasia. Several more awards followed, such as first prize for the composition Sixteenth-Century Drinking Song at the Franz Schubert International Choral Festival in Vienna (1997), first prize from the Franz Josef Reinl Foundation in Vienna for Segnali capricciosi for trumpet and orchestra (1998), and first prize in 1999 at the International Competition for European Church Music in Schwäbisch Gmünd for Hymnal Motet for choir and organ.
Since 1989, Peter Wittrich has been a music theory lecturer at the University of Music and Drama in Munich, and in 2004 he became a professor of music theory and piano studies for schoolteachers at the same institution. As a composer, his focus is mainly on choral works, sacred music, organ works, and instrumental compositions. He is also dedicated to composing for children and young people. At concerts with his ensemble Solisti Deo Gloria and the Peter Wittrich X-tett, the composer regularly presents a varied palette of new arrangements of old songs, chorales, or motets combined with modern jazz elements (Organ Blues, Missa in Blue). In his works, traditional melodies are set within highly structured compositions, sometimes infused with a hint of irony (Christmas Sonata). In Wittrich’s music, contemporary detail is merged with archaically traditional foundations in a style that goes straight to the roots of the emotions.
Fascination with the writings of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is a common thread running through Wittrich’s music. In 2018, the publisher Schott issued a cycle of his poetic piano miniatures for children titled The Little Prince, followed by a more elaborate version for piano duo (2020). His collaboration with the phenomenal musician Simon Rubin, winner of the 2014 ARD International Percussion Competition in Munich, led to the creation of the composition Desert Dreams (2021), also inspired by the same author’s writings. Part of The Little Prince was premiered on 22 July 2022 in Heidelberg with Rubin as both narrator and soloist. Because of the linking the musical numbers with free or through-composed recitatives, the work gradually developed into an 85-minute concert-length composition. Because of its dimensions, the composer decided to divide the roles of soloist and narrator (voice). The title is The Little Prince (with a pilot in the sand dunes, mysterious planets, and peculiar adults). Concerto poetico for percussion solo, narrator (voice), and instrumental ensemble based on motifs from the book with the same title by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Besides a large array of percussion, the work calls for flute/piccolo, clarinet / bass clarinet, trumpet, trombone, tuba, piano, and string quartet. The definitive version of The Little Prince is being given its world premiere today, 19 January 2026, in Prague at a concert of the Czech Chamber Music Society.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900‒1944) was born in Lyon to a family with aristocratic roots. He spent a happy childhood in the manor homes of his parents and great-aunt, and in 1917 he graduated from a grammar school in the Swiss town Fribourg. He did not finish his architecture studies at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris, where he became acquainted with the literary community and enjoyed debating in bars and cafés. He was also writing brilliant poems and essays of his own. In 1921 commenced his term of compulsory military service in the air corps; he first learned to be an aircraft maintenance technician, then he was trained as a pilot. In 1923 he was seriously injured in an accident, and he was discharged from the military on medical grounds. After that, he worked as a postal pilot on the route from Toulouse to Dakar. In the autumn of 1927 he was put in charge of the Cape Juby postal station on the west coast of Africa, where he fell in love with the desert landscape. He put his experience as a long-distance pilot to good use in the novels Courrier sud (Southern Mail) and Vol de nuit (Night Flight), which earned him worldwide recognition. Already a celebrity, Saint-Exupéry attempted another long-distance flight, this time from New York to Tierra del Fuego, but the plane crashed in Guatemala. During his convalescence, he worked on the novel Terre des hommes (published in English as Wind, Sand and Stars), which earned him the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française and ultimately the decoration of France’s Legion of Honour.
When the Second World War began, Saint-Exupéry enlisted as a captain, serving as a fighter pilot in the air force. After France’s defeat and demobilisation, he departed for the USA. When the Allies began to liberate French West Africa in 1943, the author again enlisted, this time with the Free French Air Force, despite his advanced age. In the summer of 1944, in an American Lockheed P-38 Lightning, a fighter plane altered for photographic reconnaissance missions, he took off from the Bastia-Borgo airbase in Corsica, over still occupied southern France and the Mediterranean Sea. On 31 July 1944, he failed to return from a reconnaissance flight and was declared missing in action. He had disappeared, just like his Little Prince. It was not until 2000 that the bullet-riddled wreckage of his Lightning was found at the bottom of the sea near the French port city Marseille. Today, we know he was shot down over the sea by a German Messerschmitt piloted by Horst Rippert, who said in an interview in 2010: “There was a war on, and I fired at an enemy plane. Had I known that the man sitting inside the plane was Mr Saint-Exupéry, a person I respected and admired as a great pilot and author, I would never have pulled the trigger.”
One of author’s own experiences became the inspiration for the fascinating fairy tale The Little Prince. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was often in debt. In order to pay off what he owed, he decided to accept the challenge of breaking the 87-hour flight time record for the journey from Paris to Saigon, for which a prize of 150,000 francs had been announced. He took off from the Le Bourget airfield on the morning of 29 December 1936 with the mechanic André Prévost. Exupéry’s private Caudron-Renault aircraft was loaded with fuel cannisters, and not much room was lift for food and drink. After a stopover in Tunis, he proceeded to the Libyan city Benghazi, and from there to Cairo, Egypt. When they became engulfed in dense clouds, they lost their orientation. Exupéry tried to fly below the cloud cover, but with zero visibility, he crashed into the ground in the desert landscape of Wadi al-Natrun, although the defective altimeter showed an altitude of 400 metres. The plane broke apart and a wing fell off, but both Exupéry and Prévost survived. Without food and with just a single thermos of coffee, they wandered through the desert for four days and four nights, walking dozens of kilometres until they were rescued by a Bedouin who happened to pass by. During one of those nights of feverish, hopeless wandering in the loneliness of the desert, a little golden-haired boy appeared to Exupéry from somewhere in the heavens, who had flown from his own tiny planet because he was uncertain of the love of his flower. “Please, draw me a sheep…” are the first words heard from his little voice. When the Little Prince arrives on Earth, he reflects before the lonely, stranded pilot on the strange ways of the people of this world. He tells the pilot about his travels to faraway planets with a variety of strange inhabitants, and he goes through a series of metaphorical adventures. Above all, however, he wants to return home to his rose, a flower for which he also feels responsible. In the end, he sets out resolutely, as his body on Earth dies: “I’ll look as if I were dead, and that won’t be true. [I] will be like an old abandoned shell. There’s nothing sad about an old shell. I’ll be looking at the stars, too. All the stars will be wells with a rusty pulley. All the stars will pour out water for me to drink…” Saint-Exupéry’s philosophical fairy tale, far more directed at adults than at children, still speaks to us today with the depth of its humanistic messages: “One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye”; “Only he who asks nothing in return can truly love”; “A man is alone even among his fellows. People no longer have time to know anything. They buy things all ready-made in the shops. And since friends cannot be bought, they have no friends…”; “True love never runs out. The more you give, the more you have left.”
