There were monks at Putna during Prince Stephen’s time who founded a veritable music school, thus nourishing the spirit of both the monastic communities of all Moldavian monasteries and their pilgrims.

Among them shone Venerable Eustatius. Born in Cristești, Bacău, he lived at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries and served as a protopsaltes, choir director and composer. God had endowed him with an extraordinary intellectual ability: he knew Greek and Slavonic so well that he could compose in both languages. However, loving Christ, Venerable Eustatius fled from the vanity of pleasure and worldly concerns, from empty glory and deceitful thoughts, and sought the Lord from the depths of his heart.

He found Him and discovered refuge and rest in Him through monastic life, which he spent in purity, praise, and service.

With his heart filled with the grace of Lord Christ’s presence, he expressed this spiritual experience through music, offering his fellow believers a means to attain it as well. The Mother of God, the protector of the monastery where he dedicated his life to God, sent him spiritual disciples who followed him in purity, praise, and service. For Moldavia, he was what Saint John Koukouzel, the protopsaltes of the Great Lavra, was for Mount Athos. His numerous musical compositions became models and sources of inspiration for many later church music composers. Today, only two of his manuscripts are known: the Anthologion of 1511, containing over 150 of his compositions, and the Anthologion of 1515, both preserved in Moscow. However, his work as a writer and composer was much more extensive; in recent years, fragments of two of his other manuscripts have been identified.

Venerable Eustatius gathered disciples around him and trained them. Among his first students were Monk Paphnutius, the second protopsaltes of Putna, and Hieromonk Macarius of Dobrovăț. These and other direct disciples carried on his musical legacy, forming new chanters. From the second generation of monks in this school, we can mention Hieromonk Anthony of Putna, who in 1545 wrote a Stichera Anthologion, and Protopsaltes Isachius of Râșca, mentioned in a note from 1548. A third generation of chanters trained at the Putna Musical School lived at the end of the 16th century. Among them was Hieromonk Basil of Slatina Monastery, who copied a Menaion in 1588, and Saint Theodosius of the Great Skete – Maniava, located in the Pokuttia region of present-day Ukraine.