El gat amb botes (Puss in boots) – Little symphony in four movements

“Once upon a time…” is how all the fairy tales begin. This work, therefore, too.

An awake, lively, agile, and funny beginning that describes the cat that the miller’s son inherits from his father. The cat was so smart (showing agility to hunt rats and mice, hanging from his feet or hiding in the flour to pretend to be dead…) that his new owner did not feel surprised, when he suddenly heart him saying: “you only have to provide me with a bag and a pair of boots to walk in the bushes, and you will see that your inheritance is not as poor as you think!!”

The second movement takes us to the melancholy and cartoonish melody of the miller’s son, renamed by the cat as Marquès de Carabàs. A grotesque character who sees how his sly and purring cat promotes him to court and imaginatively positions him as the future husband of the princess, proving to him that his inheritance really wasn’t as poor as he thought. In the third movement, two new characters appear in the story: the King, solemn and majestic, and the princess, with her romantic dreams.

The tale ends, of course, with the intervention of the cat, crunching the ogre and getting a castle for the Marquès of Carabàs. In the last movement, the cartoonish melody of the miller’s son is transformed into a royal march, in the same way that the character of the Marquès of Carabàs is transformed into the husband of the princess, thanks to the astuteness of Puss in Boots.