The Poet’s Echo Op.76 (1965)

Pushkin’s poetry was also a potent source of inspiration for Russian song – as outstanding examples by Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky and Rachmaninov, among others, confirm. Few composers outside Russia, however, have set Pushkin in the original and fewer still, like Benjamin Britten, with little knowledge of the language. Intending to write a set of songs for Galina Vishnevskaya and Mstislav Rostropovich while he and Peter Pears were holidaying with them in Armenia, Britten had bought a bilingual edition of Pushkin’s poems at Heathrow on the way out. Duly installed at the House of Composers in Dilizhan, he explained, “I got Slava and Galya to read the poems I chose from the English crib in my Penguin, and painstakingly they set about teaching me to pronounce them properly. I worked out a transliteration of six of them and began setting them to music…”

Lines written during a sleepless night – with its simple but magical texture of staccato sevenths in the pianist’s right hand tick-tocking over a legato line in the left – definitively closes the cycle by recalling the opening phrase of the first song on the despairing last words, “Answer me, I long to hear.” Shortly after The Poet’s Echo was completed, in August 1965, Pears and Britten tried out the cycle in the Pushkin House Museum. When they started on Lines written during a sleepless night, Galina Vishnevskaya recalls, “Pushskin’s clock began to strike midnight and the twelve strokes chimed in exact symmetry with Ben’s music. We all froze.”

sung in the English version by Peter Pears

Echo

My Heart…

Angel

The Nightingale and the Rose

Epigram

Lines written during a sleepless night

The way Britten got to work on The Poet’s Echo was not, he said, “a method I would recommond to composers setting foreign words: it is best to learn the language first.” Having little Russian but intending to write a set of songs for Galina Vishnevskaya and Mstislav Rostropovich while he and Peter Pears were holidaying with them in Armenia, he had bought a bilingual edition of Pushkin’s poems at Heathrow on the way out. Duly installed at the House of Composers in Dilizhan, “I got Slava and Galya to read the poems I chose from the English crib in my Penguin, and painstakingly they set about teaching me to pronounce them properly. I worked out a transliteration of six of them and began setting them to music… The result we called, in Russian, Echo Poeta, literally Poet’s Echo. It is really a dialogue between the poet and the unresponsiveness of the natural world he describes.”

The poet’s dilemma is economically but vividly symbolised in the first song, Echo, where every phrase in the vocal line is echoed, though never literally, in a two-part canon on the piano – until, that is, Pushkin comes to the echo itself which, like the poet, hears no reply and the canon is replaced by dry chords. The opening theme of Echo, with its diagnostic rising seventh, is recalled in canon at the end. It reappears in varied form, with the seventh now changed to a more euphonious sixth, at the beginning of the romantically inclined My Heart… Diatonic harmony also has a role in Angel where, in contrast to Satan’s sullen theme in piano octaves, major and minor triads characterise the Angel, most effectively of all in the radiantly unambiguous A major preceding Satan’s “Forgive.”

One of the most beautiful of all Britten’s songs, The Nightingale and the Rose returns to the theme of nature’s unresponsiveness, represented in this case by the rose that “no poems can entrance,” not even the nightingale’s love song. An irregularly pulsing night-music of major seconds persists throughout in the piano part, at first in the right hand but towards the end, as Pushkin addresses the frustrated poet and the exotic voice of the nightingale passes from the soprano to the upper part of the keyboard, in the left. At the central climax of the song, a variant of the Echo theme rises in a sixth and then a despairing tenth in the vocal line.

Allegedly out of place here, Epigram – a caricature of Pushkin’s chief in Odessa, Count Vorontsov, who was brought up in England – introduces a timely element of rough satire before another nocturnal inspiration. Lines written during a sleepless night closes the cycle firmly but discreetly by means of the recurring melodic line in the pianist’s left hand, the tick-tock of sevenths in the right and, above all, a literal recall of the Echo theme as the poet can get no answer: “Answer me, I long to hear.”

Shortly after The Poet’s Echo was completed, in August 1965, Pears and Britten tried out the cycle in the Pushkin House Museum. When they started on Lines written during a sleepless night, Galina Vishnevskaya recalls, “Pushskin’s clock began to strike midnight and the twelve strokes chimed in exact symmetry with Ben’s music. We all froze.” The first performance proper was given by Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich in the less atmospheric surroundings of the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire three months later. The excellent English version by Peter Pears was printed alongside Pushkin’s Russian and Hans Keller’s German when the work was published in 1967.

Gerald Larner ©2007