On May 1, 1955, the Union of Czechoslovak Composers joined the December call of the Union of Soviet Composers to promote cooperation in songwriting between composers and poets. It, therefore, called on the Union of Czechoslovak Writers to work together. At the end of June 1955, the poet Miloslav Bureš sent the composer Bohuslav Martinů the poetic cycle The Song about the Well of Rubies. A year later, Bureš sent him another "song": To his old mother's song, and a year later A song About Mikš from the mountains. Martinů set the first of them to music immediately and renamed it The Opening of the Wells, H 354. But the "song" did not remain in the names of later cantatas, too. In 1957, when the composer was waiting for the poet in Rome, he set the following masterpiece to music: He called it The Romance from the Dandelions, H 364. He previously set to music another Bureš's cycle, renamed The Legend of the Smoke from Potato Tops, H 360. Martinů protested with this cantata in the autumn of 1956 against the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution. He postponed Bureš's last "song" for several years, until the beginning of 1959. He named this cantata Mikesh from the Mountains, H 375, and dedicated it to the founder and first choirmaster of Kühn's mixed choir, Pavel Kühn, for the first public concert of this ensemble on June 18, 1959.
The composer seems to have received A song About Mikš from the mountains in late August 1957. He considered the verses “beautiful" and emphasised how deeply he was moved. All the same, he suggested to the poet that he approach other composers: “You currently have the three poems, so that will suffice for now. So if you have the option of finding a different composer, which no doubt you have, do not worry about me.” This decision was caused both by the fact that he was working on other new compositions, and by other circumstances that he did not specify to avoid censorship: “Even despite these reasons, I myself think that it will be better if I keep my silence for a while, though I do not want to tell you why." He kept to his intentions and postponed setting the text to music for more than a year. Even so, he asked Bureš to revise the poem twice. The cantata Mikesh from the Mountains marks a definitive end to Martinů’s cycle of compositions on Bureš’s texts, which he had worked on intermittently for the last five years of his life
Less than two weeks after the premiere, on 29 June 1959, representatives of SNKLHU sent the composer a draft contract for the publication of the work together with the previous unpublished cantatas, and the edition was published the following year, ie after the composer's death.
Vít Zouhar, Hudební rozhledy, 73/2020; Bohuslav Martinů Complete Edition VI/2/3, © 2016 Editio Bärenreiter Praha