BECKY LU: Britten's Russia | Pushkin's Britain

Becky Lu offers a musical and cultural exploration of “Echo,” the first song from the cycle The Poet’s Echo, Benjamin Britten’s setting of six poems by Alexander Pushkin.

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In August 1965, Britten and Pears purchased a book of translated Pushkin verse [1] at Heathrow while on their way to meet the Rostropoviches for a monthlong holiday in the Soviet Union. Britten would finish The Poet’s Echo, his setting of six poems from that book, by the end of the trip. “For Galya and Slava,” as Britten handwrote in both Cyrillic and English in the dedication, he composed the vocal part expressly for Vishnevskaya’s voice and the piano part for Rostropovich [2].

The dedicatees premiered the Pushkin cycle in Moscow later that year, but the work had its initial outing at the Pushkin family estate in the rural idyll outside Pskov [3]. After dinner, with Britten at the upright piano in the estate caretaker’s house, Vishnevskaya tried out the completed songs and Pears hummed those still in progress. As Pears recalls in his diary, the evening concluded with a convergence of spiritual affinities:

The last song of the set is the marvellous poem of insomnia, the ticking clock, persistent night-noises and the poet’s cry for a meaning in them. Ben has started this with repeated staccato notes high-low high-low on the piano. Hardly had the little old piano begun its dry tick tock tick tock, than clear and silvery outside the window, a yard from our heads, came ding, ding, ding, not loud but clear, Pushkin’s clock joining in his song. It seemed to strike far more than midnight, to go on all through the song, and afterward we sat spellbound. It was the most natural thing to have happened, and yet unique, astonishing, wonderful. [4]

Despite the apparent alignments of this impromptu performance, there was nothing “natural” about the way Britten set the poems; he admitted he tackled the project to improve his “obstinately bad Russian” [5]. Britten was proficient in German, French, Italian, and Latin, and had set these languages to music with little help other than Pears, but with Russian,

I got Slava and Galya to read the poems…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.I would write a song, then play it over and get Slava to correct the prosody. It is not perhaps a method I would recommend to composers setting foreign words: it is best to learn the language first. But it was nice to find that I seemed to have gotten the emphasis right, and have caught something of the mood of these vivid, haunting poems: if I haven’t, Pushkin still remains intact! [6]

Nor were the broader historical and cultural circumstances surrounding such an endeavour inevitable, though Britten had a lifelong enthusiasm for Russian music and literature [7]. Compared to works by other canonic Russian writers, translations of Pushkin were far less available to twentieth-century British readers [8]. Britten’s interest in Russian literature, like most anglophones, began with translations of novels by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy or plays by Chekhov. Indeed, Chekhov was likely the first Russian writer whose works Britten studied while at Gresham’s, the boarding school he attended from 1928 until 1930 [9]. As late as 1967, two years after he composed the Pushkin cycle, Britten told an interviewer from a Soviet music magazine that his “utmost dream would be to create an opera form equivalent to Chekhov’s dramas” [10], a work that never materialized. Between 1965 and 1968, however, an opera based not on Chekhov’s dramas but on Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina was in progress. Colin Graham had gone through three drafts of the libretto, which contain Britten’s annotations, but no musical sketches exist. Britten apparently abandoned the project because of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 [11], after which the Foreign Office informed Britten he had to turn down the Bolshoi commission [12]. More recently, Cameron Pyke and Paul Kildea counter this explanation, contending that the composer’s problems with the opera were more musical than political [13]. In any case, Britten’s Anna Karenina would have been in English.

Britten setting Pushkin poetry is a linguistic quirk in the established repertory, the only instance, as far as I know, of an anglophone with next-to-no Russian language skills setting Russian poetry. “Musical Pushkiniana” is a fertile field, but it is sowed mostly by Slavists or Westerners using translations [14]. And yet, perhaps Pushkin’s clock joining in Britten’s song was no fluke; the 20th century British composer and 19th century Russian poet may well be spiritually aligned. Through a close reading of “Echo,” the first song from the Pushkin cycle, with excursions into post-tonal voice leading and Russian literary culture, I propose that Britten is more “Russian,” and Pushkin more “Brit(ten)ish,” than we might presume.

Acknowledging Britten’s linguistic difficulties, Arnold Whittall senses a “degree of caution” in the work; some of the songs seem “frigid,” because they “tend more toward ‘conceit’ than Britten normally favoured” [15]. In “Echo,” Britten does approach the setting of the poem predictably—with echo effects—and in the penultimate line (line 11), when Pushkin mourns the plight of the poet, who faithfully responds but receives nothing back, the echoes fade [16]. With the prosody, Britten also takes few liberties. The poem consists of two six-line stanzas, each with four lines in iambic tetrameter that rhyme (lines 1, 2, 3, 5) and two in iambic dimeter on a different rhyme (lines 4, 6). The melodic rhythm and contour of the song adhere strictly to the metrical feet of each line: the unstressed syllable always falls on a shorter, weaker beat than the following stressed syllable [17]. Furthermore, the harmonic pacing is straightforward; Britten sets each line of the poem with a different sonority, though a few of the lines are grouped together. Figure 1 summarizes the harmonic scheme. The chords are notated as they appear in the piano part, which the vocal line—and the upper voices in the piano—echoes almost exactly, occasionally adding a passing or neighbor tone. (Bars 35-39, the echoless setting of line 11, are not included in the figure. For the purposes of this study, I consider the passage a harmonic aside that essentially prolongs the sonority from mm. 29-34.)

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Figure 1. In addition to the harmonic summary, I mark Pushkin’s poem with the stress pattern. My (near) word-for-word translation is intentionally dry, meant for analytical rather than literary purposes; I make no attempt to preserve the rhyming scheme and echo effects. For comparison, I replicate Peter Pears’s singing translation as it appears in the score. He preserves the meter, though he had to alter the rhyming scheme—slightly—in Pushkin’s poem: lines 3 and 5 rhyme with 1 and 2, as do lines 9 and 11 with 7 and 8. Please click on image to expand.

And yet, Britten eschews other obvious “conceits.” Opportunities abound for word painting, but he focuses exclusively on Pushkin’s “labyrinth of echoes” [18], to borrow Michael Wachtel’s characterization of the poem. Labyrinthine, indeed, describes aptly Britten’s setting: the echo effects extend well beyond the musical surface and are not at all straightforward, and thus, no mere conceit.

Analysts seem to disagree on harmonic readings of “Echo.” The song begins and ends with what Whittall calls a “‘dissonant tonic sonority,’ whose bass note of F is the principal point of focus, achieving maximum clarification at the climax [m. 29]…” [19]. For Peter Evans, this F is not the tonic but rather a “leading-note,” since it supports a tritone and a major seventh [20]. Christopher Mark looks to the dissonant tonic sonority’s return at the end of the cycle for clarification, but finds obfuscation instead: the chord’s final iteration in “Lines Written During a Sleepless Night” is at the dominant level, but it ultimately dissolves rather than resolves [21]. Labels like tonic, leading-note, and dominant, however, suggest the analysts actually all hear the song in functional harmonic terms. They focus on the triads, when available, within the sonorities to identify them, and they assume smooth voice leading and minimal voice crossings between chords—Evans, for example, hears the initial low F as leading to the low F# in m. 5.

In addition, motivic analyses—such as Mark’s essay, which is less concerned with harmony and more with hermeneutic readings of “musical cross-references between songs” [22]—of Britten’s output are common, especially those concerning works from the 1960s onwards [23]. As Britten’s musical language becomes sparser and instances of functional harmony more elusive [24], analysts either avoid discussing overall harmonic schemes or do so piecemeal. Still, while “Echo,” and the cycle as a whole, does seem consistent motivically and gesturally, how does the song cohere as the chords below change with the lines of the poem? A conventional harmonic analysis might simplify the bassline to F-F#-D#-C-D-A-F [25], the lowest notes of the piano chords notated in Figure 1, but are the “roots” of the chords meaningful as such here? Or is the chord progression, and thus the bassline, random? If so, F cannot achieve clarification, as Whittall hears it; even if the song begins and ends on F, “achievement” suggests some semblance of tonal hierarchy, which is not readily apparent.

Observers mostly assume that Britten’s music is inherently tonal, or at least triadic, though they acknowledge a shift toward “high modernist” techniques beginning with indeterminacy in Curlew River and twelve-tone methods in Songs and Proverbs of William Blake. Britten completed the latter shortly before Poet’s Echo, but Whittall hears the Pushkin songs as a retreat from the twelve-tone “completeness” of the Blake setting [26], in which Britten uses the tone row in the proverbs as “a concept of inclusiveness which may represent Blake’s ‘infinity’ held ‘in the palm of your hand’ (Proverb VII)” [27]. While Britten may not be using twelve-tone techniques in the Pushkin songs, the rolled chord that begins “Echo”—Whittall’s dissonant tonic sonority—is a uniquely “complete” harmony. Set-class 0146 is one of only two “all-interval” tetrachords [28], which contain exactly one of every interval, a feature that intrigued Webern, Schoenberg, and Carter, especially [29]. Aside from the brief echoless passage (mm. 35-39), “Echo” consists solely of tetrachords in the piano part [30]. Figure 2 shows to which set class each tetrachord belongs and its interval content.

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Figure 2. Tetrachordal analysis of “Echo.” Please click on image to expand.

The only ostensible exception is the pentachord at the song’s climax, m. 29. (Whittall hears it primarily as an F minor triad [31].) Still, this pentachord could be understood as two overlapping tetrachords, 0147 (F-Ab-B-C) and 0148 (F-Ab-C-E), which, in the broader context of Britten’s output, is not unusual. To create musical climaxes, Britten often stacks previously introduced material. In the last song of the Pushkin cycle, “Lines Written During a Sleepless Night,” he stacks two tetrachords at the climax, set-class 0146 from “Echo” and set-class 0157, which play a similarly central role in “Lines” as 0146 does in “Echo.” In the first movement of his second string quartet, all of the themes from the three-part exposition are stacked together, played simultaneously by all of the instruments, at the climactic moment of recapitulation.

The interval content vectors [32] of the “Echo” tetrachords reveal other notable features: all of them except one (m. 8, set-class 0347)—and the aforementioned pentachord—contain one or two minor seconds and exactly one tritone (see the first and last digit of each ic vector). These dissonant intervals are, in turn, balanced by less dissonant intervals like minor thirds, which are also prevalent (see the third digit of each ic vector). Thus, the similar intervallic content of the chords contributes to the coherence of the harmonic progression in “Echo.” The tetrachords are not bound together by conventional voice leading because the tritones and minor seconds do not resolve properly. Even if triadic harmonies are cherry-picked out of the tetrachords—see m. 5, 8, 12, and 16 in Figure 2, moving from F# diminished, D# major, C diminished, to D minor, all in root position—the progression is disjunct. Rather, the overall progression coheres because the tetrachords are intervallically—and by extension, sonically—similar, perched perilously between dissonance and consonance. The all-interval tetrachord that frames the song epitomizes this tenuous balance. In some ways, the progression is random: the chords do not have to be in this order. In other ways that will be addressed shortly, Britten restricted his selection to a limited number of chords. Perhaps that is what Britten meant when he thought his setting had “gotten the emphasis right.” Each tetrachord initiates the echoes, and no matter how unrelated the stimuli—from maiden to beast, earth to heaven—the poet faithfully responds. Pushkin chose these stimuli not for narrative reasons, but for sonic ones, and in turn, Britten chose these tetrachords based not on conventional voice leading relationships, but on their intervallic content.

Pushkin’s “Зхо” [33] has been of special interest to literary and Slavic studies scholars, and there is consensus that the poem is not only about Echo or echoes, but also the “virtuoso exploitation of all aspects of Russian (sound, syntax, stanza)” [34]. The rhyming scheme creates obvious echoes, but other linguistic features are continuously reflected, refracted, and inverted— in a word, mediated—throughout the poem [35]. In his exhaustive analysis of the “sound-texture” of the poem, D. Ward points out the myriad ways Pushkin’s phoneme patterns participate in the total meaning of the work. In the opening phrase, for example, “Ревёт ли зверь” (literally, “Roars if the beast”) displays a reversal of phonemes; the /r,…v,/ from “Ревёт” is mirrored in the /v,…r,/ from “зверь” [36]. Reversed phoneme patterns are also evident across stanzas in corresponding locations; the /gl/ – /gr,…gr,/ from lines 1 and 2, “Ревёт ли зверь в лесу глухом, / Трубит ли рог, гремит ли гром,” are mirrored by /gr,…gr,/ – /gl/ in lines 7 and 8, “Ты внемлешь грохоту громов, / И гласу бури и валов” [37].

The pitches of Britten’s tetrachords, like Pushkin’s phonemes, are entangled in the process in addition to serving as the catalyst for the echo effects. Their similar intervallic content, in fact, means that the tetrachords are also near transpositions and inversions of each other—and thus, closely related in post-tonal terms. Hearing the relationships between them as such hews even more faithfully to the idea of a labyrinth of echoes, as if each chord is refracted by an uneven, though unsounded, surface, akin to echoes bouncing off of trees in a “deep forest.” Consider the voice leading possibilities from tetrachords 1 to 6 in the following figures [38].

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Figure 3. Transpositional voice leading between tetrachords 1 through 6 in “Echo.” Please click on image to expand.

Though the letters denote pitch class, each tetrachord is stacked in Figure 3, from low to high, as it is in the score. (The doubling of some of the voices in the piano part has been eliminated.) This figure, therefore, illustrates the trajectory of each voice if each chord is understood as a transposition of its predecessor. Overall, the voice leading is not smooth due to the many voice crossings, but it is systematic. The voice leading between tetrachords 2 and 3 is what post-tonal theorists consider maximally uniform; “that is, it comes as close as possible to being an actual transposition, deviating by only one semitone of offset” [39]. The path from F# to D# is the only one involving 9 semitones, while the rest of the voices move by 10 semitones. Following post-tonal theory conventions, the transposition is labeled “*T,” for “fuzzy transposition.” The prevailing interval of transposition, 10 semitones, is indicated in the subscript number and the deviations from that, 1 semitone, is indicated in the parentheses underneath. For the remaining tetrachords, the voice leading is nearly maximally uniform, because the transpositions deviate by two semitones of offset.

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Figure 4. Inversional voice leading between tetrachords 1 through 6 in “Echo.” Please click on image to expand.

These same tetrachords can also be heard as inversions of each other. Figure 4 uses the same labeling conventions, except “*I” indicates “fuzzy inversion.” Similar to the paths in Figure 3, the inversional voice leading is not smooth due to the multiple voice crossings but, other than the path between tetrachords 4 and 5, it is, nevertheless, maximally uniform or nearly maximally uniform. Of course, the two figures can be combined into one progression that involves both transpositions and inversions, but either way, Britten’s tetrachords are impure echoes of each other. Teasing out a conventional bassline for the overall progression runs counter to the intended effect, as these chords have no consistent “roots.”

Despite the lack of manuscript evidence, it is inconceivable that Britten happened randomly onto these particular tetrachords; his choices were systematic. Only attending to the surface echo effects in the song would be akin to listening only for the rhyming schemes of the poem; in both, the conceits belie a labyrinthian complexity. In Britten’s “Echo,” as in Pushkin’s “Зхо,” and as in the material world, echoes are ineluctably mediated.

My aim is not to enhance Britten’s high modernist credentials with this post-tonal reading of “Echo.” Certain moments do hint at a harmonic center. In the echoless passage (Example 1), the parts diverge harmonically and texturally for the first and only time. The vocal line seems to insist on F minor, while the piano moves to a D minor triad (m. 36), then to an A minor triad (m. 38), before both converge on the all-interval tetrachord at the song’s end. An intrepid analyst could very well make a persuasive argument to hear the song on more consistently tonal terms, based on these triads.

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Example 1. “Echo,” mm. 35-39 (line 11). Please click on image to expand.

In addition, while commentators claim to hear manifestations of “Russianness” [40] in the Pushkin cycle, none mention its octatonicism; after all, every tetrachord except 0156 (mm. 22-28) is an octatonic subset. The song could be parsed according to octatonic collections [41], but without much meaningful payoff; the “Russianness” of this work has little to do with Britten’s frequent use of minor seconds and tritones, which easily supports an octatonic reading. Instead, I offer this tetrachordal analysis in conjunction with other possible analyses (whether triadic, octatonic, tonal, or atonal), because Britten’s approach to this song has striking affinities with the synthetic impulses of 19th-century Russian literature—a “Russianness” that Pushkin defined.

For semantic and structural reasons, literary scholars believe Pushkin’s “Зхо” is based on “A Sea-shore Echo,” a poem by Englishman Barry Cornwall [42]. Pushkin’s favorite meter for narrative verse and lyric poetry was iambic tetrameter, thus the structure of “Зхо” is rare in his output. It was common, however, in Romantic English poetry, which Pushkin avidly read [43].

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Example 2. “A Sea-Shore Echo,” Barry Cornwall, 1829 [44]. Please click on image to expand.

Philip Cavendish adds that “Зхо” was likely further inspired by another Cornwall poem, “Ulls-water and Its Echoes,” as well as Gavrila Derzhavin’s “Ekho” [45]. And meta-poetically, Pushkin’s echoes are of course “a rearticulation of a classical subject—the Echo myth—with a rich and complex tradition in European history from the early medieval period onwards” [46]. While “Зхо” is extraordinary as a literary work, considered within its cultural context, it is somewhat less so, because the integration of extra-Russian literature was essential to 19th-century Russian literary culture.

Pushkin’s linguistic facility was widely acknowledged by his peers, and it was evident early on. At the exclusive boarding school he attended, he was known as “the Frenchman” [47]. Throughout his career, Pushkin read works by writers of diverse nationalities through French translations, eventually learning some English and Italian as well. Like composers from Bach to Beethoven, whose pedagogical copying of others’ scores amounted to a form of close study, Pushkin regularly translated foreign texts [48], and this approach to writing was hardly unique. Writer-translators were the rule rather than the exception beginning from the late 18th and throughout the 19th century in Russia, and they translated not only Western European texts [49].

During Pushkin’s lifetime, moreover, literature played an outsized role in national self-definition, and Imperial Russia had paradoxically anti-imperialist attitudes about literature and national identity [50]. As Dostoevsky, quoting Gogol, writes, Pushkin “…was ‘not only a Russian, but the first Russian.’ For a Russian not to understand Pushkin means to be deprived of the right to call himself a Russian” [51]. Though the popularity of Pushkin’s works has waxed and waned in his homeland, few deny Pushkin’s centrality to the notion of “Russianness.” He has been a constant point of cultural consensus in pre- and post-revolutionary Russia, and this lofty status stems from his exceptional ability to translate, which presupposes the power to understand. In other words, he could grasp the spirit as well as he could the letter. As Dostoevsky asserts in his speech celebrating the first monument to Pushkin in 1880,

In fact, in European literatures there were artistic geniuses of immense magnitude—Shakespeares, Cervanteses, Schillers. But point to even one of these geniuses who could have possessed such an aptitude for universal responsiveness as our Pushkin. And this very capability, the major capability of our nationality, he precisely shares with our people, and by virtue of this he is preeminently a national poet. Even the greatest of the European poets themselves were never able to embody with such strength as Pushkin the genius of an alien…On the contrary, turning to foreign nations, the European poets usually reincarnated them in their own nationality, and understood them in their own way. Even in Shakespeare, his Italians, for example, are almost everywhere the very same Englishmen. Pushkin alone of all world poets has the virtue of reincarnating himself wholly into an alien nationality. [52]

Hence, Pushkin could write about the English or Italians better than they could write about themselves, and this proteanism makes him the “first Russian.” And if an aptitude for universal responsiveness was the “major capability” of his nationality, then “Russianness,” at its core, is not exclusively associated with folk primitivism, tragic anti-heroes, childlike innocence, or any of the exotic tropes Western observers tended to perceive as authentically Russian in the 19th and 20th centuries [53]. Pushkin’s Russianness—its truest manifestation—entails the synthesis of all ideas from all nationalities.

Contemporary scholars continue to read Pushkin this way, working to unpack his texts. Wachtel maintains that

…few poets so consistently and so consciously embedded their verse in the literary culture of their time and, for that matter, of previous times. Pushkin’s lyric poetry is teeming with references to other poets and poems; his mind was constantly alert to their accomplishments and to possibilities that they had left unexplored. To an extraordinary extent, Pushkin’s own achievement is in rewriting rather than writing. [54]

Nothing in the Britten-Pears Foundation archive indicates Britten knew much about Pushkin’s reception history, his biography, or the poem’s genealogy [55]. Had he known, it seems unlikely he would have failed to mention the connections between Pushkin and Cornwall. Beyond Britten’s interest in classical subjects [56], the vivid imagery of “A Sea-shore Echo” should have been tremendously appealing for the composer of Peter Grimes, and lifelong resident of the Suffolk coast. That Britten was probably unaware and yet responds so strikingly to Pushkin’s literary proteanism with musical proteanism of his own, makes the continuous feedback generated by this translation loop all the more startling.

“Echo” demonstrates the same synthetic impulses as “Зхо.” Instead of incorporating sounds or techniques from music 20th-century listeners might associate with Russianness, Britten frames his song with the all-interval tetrachord—rarely used by Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and Prokofiev [57] but an integral part of Carter’s vocabulary. The ostensibly high-modernist choice is all the more surprising considering the widely acknowledged “accessibility” of Britten’s music, not to mention his criticism throughout his career of “snobs who demand the latest avant-garde tricks” [58]. But unlike Carter, who comprehensively explored the compositional potential of both all-interval tetrachords for their own sakes, Britten uses 0146 for its proteanism. This ambiguous sonority, which teeters between consonance and dissonance due to its interval content, allows Britten easy voice leading access—one or two semitones offset—to other tetrachords that sound similar but have more triadic or tonal implications. As a result, the overall effect is neither strictly triadic nor octatonic, tonal nor atonal, but all of these, and more. There is little in the musical language of Britten’s setting that is exclusively Russian, which makes it all the more Russian.

The other songs of the Pushkin cycle similarly resist facile harmonic categorization. “My Heart” seems to end triumphantly on B major, but it is also thoroughly pentatonic; and just as the octatonicism of “Echo” is not suggestive of exotic Russianness, the pentatonicism of the second song is not suggestive of exotic Asianness. Modal scales pervade “The Nightingale and the Rose,” the fourth and longest song, but it manages to sound both ancient and avant-garde. In the final “Lines Written During a Sleepless Night,” Britten returns to the tetrachordal approach and voice-leading practices of “Echo,” ending the cycle without harmonically resolving the all-interval tetrachord. Altogether, Britten shows that Pushkin’s texts are best served by Pushkin’s means, and musical Russia is indeed the integration of extra-Russian idioms.

In Pushkin’s reimagination of Cornwall, accordingly, there is little that is exclusively British, English, or classical. The sublime, natural setting of Cornwall’s poem is a characteristic mark of Romantic English poetry, but Pushkin moves it to an undisclosed, if rural, location, allowing readers to set it in their own worlds. Whereas Cornwall relies on Echo the nymph as “representative of the fleeting nature of beauty and love” [59], Pushkin turns the reader into Echo, implicating us with the repeated use of the familiar form of “you.” Moreover, who or what is echo is ambiguous; “Зхо” could refer to the nymph or the noun, depending on its capitalization, but the word never reappears in the poem. By reading the poem, Pushkin turns us into echoes, and ultimately, the poet. As Dostoevsky said, “Pushkin alone of all world poets has the virtue of reincarnating himself wholly into an alien nationality,” and when we respond to the poem, as Britten did, Pushkin reincarnates once again.

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Notes

1. See Fennell. ↩
2. While his prowess at the piano may not be as widely recognized as his command of the cello, the recording Rostropovich made with Vishnevskaya of The Poet’s Echo reveals the extent of his keyboard skills. ↩
3. A city in northwestern Russia. The family estate is now The Pushkin Museum-Reserve and open to the public. ↩
4. Pears, 132-133. ↩
5. Britten, “A Composer in Russia,” 282. ↩
6. Britten, “A Composer in Russia,” 282. ↩
7. Documented most recently and extensively in Pyke. ↩
8. See Bullock, “Untranslated and Untranslatable? Pushkin’s Poetry in English, 1892-1931.” ↩
9. One of the prizes Britten received upon graduation from Gresham’s was Constance Garnett’s 1928 translation of The Cherry Orchard. See Pyke 4. ↩
10. Pyke, 4. ↩
11. Reed and Cook, 325. ↩
12. Kildea, 379. Colin Graham’s libretto eventually went to American composer David Carlson, whose Anna Karenina premiered in 2007. ↩
13. See Pyke 115, and Kildea 478-479. ↩
14. See Gasparov. ↩
15. Whittall, 228. ↩
16. Ideally, it is best to read the analytical portion of my essay with Britten’s score handy, though I provide musical examples when necessary. For copyright reasons, I cannot attach the score here. Faber Music does publish it online, however, and your educational institution may provide access. ↩
17. For comparison, listen to Vissarion Shebalin’s choral setting of the same poem, in which the musical line and rhythm also follow the prosody closely. Probably due to help from the Rostropoviches, Britten’s setting is similar prosodically to that of a native Russian speaker. ↩
18. M. Wachtel, A Commentary to Pushkin’s Lyric Poetry, 233. ↩
19. Whittall, 229. ↩
20. Evans, 383. ↩
21. Mark, 223. ↩
22. Mark, 223. ↩
23. See Evans 382-384, for example. ↩
24. See Mark 209-212. ↩
25. This leaves out mm. 35-39 (line 11), which I consider a harmonic aside for the purposes of this essay. ↩
26. Whittall, 229. ↩
27. Whittall, 222. ↩
28. The other is set-class 0137. ↩
29. Alan Theisen has written extensively about Carter’s fascination with all-interval tetrachords. ↩
30. Again, this assumes mm. 35-39 (line 11), which is somewhat triadic, nevertheless prolongs the tetrachord that precedes it. ↩
31. Whittall, 229. ↩
32. In post-tonal theory, ic vectors provide shortcuts to understanding the interval content of any chord. Each digit refers to a type of interval; from left to right, the first digit indicates how many minor seconds are in a chord, the second indicates how many major seconds, the third indicates how many minor thirds, and so on. For example, set-class 0236 has an ic vector of 112101, so this tetrachord contains 1 minor second, 1 major second, 2 minor thirds, 1 major third, 0 perfect fourths, and 1 tritone. In post-tonal theory, there are only 6 possible types of intervals, because complementary intervals are considered equivalent; thus, minor sixth is the same as a major third, perfect fourth is the same as a perfect fifth, and so on. ↩
33. For clarity from this point onward, I will refer to Pushkin’s poem by its Cyrillic title, "Эхо," and Britten’s song by its English title, "Echo." ↩
34. M. Wachtel, A Commentary to Pushkin’s Lyric Poetry, 233. See also Ward and Cavendish. ↩
35. The traditional Russian declamation of the poem can be heard online. ↩
36. Ward, 381. ↩
37. Ward, 381. ↩
38. For the purposes of this study and for visual clarity, I limit the discussion for the tetrachords only, so I only illustrate the voice leading path for the first six chords here and exclude the path to and from the pentachord. For readers interested in voice leading between set classes of different cardinalities (i.e, moving between triads, tetrachords, and pentachords), I refer you to the post-tonal theoretical literature on voice leading, including the article I cite here by Straus. In the case of “Echo,” parsimonious voice leading holds whether moving from tetrachord to tetrachord or tetrachord to pentachord; each chord in this song is always only one or two semitones offset from the next. ↩
39. Straus, 46. Semitonal offset refers to deviations from strict transposition or inversion. For instance, if I transpose C-E-G up 4 semitones, I get E-G#-B. Because this is a strict transposition, the semitonal offset is 0; every pitch from the first trichord moves up 4 semitones to the second trichord without deviation. But if I transpose C-E-G to E-G-B, the middle voice only moves 3 semitones, while the outer voices move up 4 semitones. This is not a strict transposition, because one voice deviates from the prevailing transposition of 4 semitones, though it only deviates by 1 step. Thus, the semitonal offset is 1. Nevertheless, in post-tonal terms, we would consider C-E-G and E-G-B closely related trichords because the semitonal offset is small, just not as closely related as C-E-G and E-G#-B. ↩
40. See Johnson 199, for example. ↩
41. For example, in mm. 1-4 (line 1), Britten uses pitch classes from the OCT_0,1 collection; in mm. 5-7 (line 2), the piano part draws from OCT_2,3, and the vocal part draws from OCT_0,1. ↩
42. Barry Cornwall is the pseudonym for Bryan Waller Procter (1787-1874), a minor English poet who mainly worked as a lawyer in London and was a Harrow School classmate of Byron. While Byron was obviously a prominent role model for Pushkin, Cornwall was “his beloved British poet.” See M. Wachtel, A Commentary to Pushkin’s Lyric Poetry, 216. Pushkin regularly translated Cornwall’s poems into Russian, and “Зхо” is not the only instance Pushkin based his own work on Cornwall’s. For why Pushkin’s version may be an improvement on Cornwall’s, see M. Wachtel, The Development of the Russian Verse: Meter and its Meanings, 7-12. ↩
43. M. Wachtel, A Commentary to Pushkin’s Lyric Poetry, 233. Compare Pushkin’s “Эхо” to Cornwall’s “A Sea-shore Echo;” Pushkin even replicated the formatting of Cornwall’s poem, indenting the lines in iambic dimeter (lines 4 and 6). ↩
44. Quoted in M. Wachtel, A Commentary to Pushkin’s Lyric Poetry, 233. ↩
45. Cavendish, 441. Derzhavin (1743-1816) was generally considered to be Russia’s greatest poet before Pushkin. ↩
46. Cavendish, 440. ↩
47. Bethea and Davydov, 12. ↩
48. Some of his favorites include Byron, Shakespeare, Walter Scott, and of course, Cornwall. ↩
49. See A. Wachtel 62-63. ↩
50. See A. Wachtel. ↩
51. Dostoievsky, 940. ↩
52. Quoted in A. Wachtel, 70. ↩
53. See Hughes, for example; see also Bullock, “The Invention of Russia,” in Rosa Newmarch and Russian Music in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century England, 19-37. ↩
54. M. Wachtel, A Commentary to Pushkin’s Lyric Poetry, xvii. ↩
55. Neither the Britten-Pears Foundation archive nor Britten and Pears’s personal library contain copies of Cornwall’s poetry. Considering Britten and Pears’s literary tastes and educational background, it seems impossible that they would have had no familiarity with Cornwall. Still, I have yet to find evidence confirming they had read “A Sea-Shore Echo” or had been aware of Pushkin’s repeated references to Cornwall’s works. There are, however, original manuscripts and potentially other material relating to Britten’s composition of A Poet’s Echo that are not available at the BPF and to Western scholars. Britten composed most of the songs while in Dilizhan, Armenia, when it was part of the USSR, and those materials are held by a private collection in Russia. ↩
56. Apollo from Death in Venice; Phaedra, op. 93; and Six Metamorphoses after Ovid, op. 49, to name but a few. ↩
57. Russian composers Britten openly admired and borrowed from in earlier works. See Pyke. The other all-interval tetrachord, 0137, is a part of Stravinsky’s harmonic vocabulary, however. ↩
58. Britten, “On Receiving the First Aspen Award.” ↩
59. M. Wachtel, The Development of the Russian Verse, 9. ↩

Works Cited

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• Britten, Benjamin. “A Composer in Russia.” Britten on Music, edited by Paul Kildea, Boydell Press, 2003, pp. 281-284.

• ---. “On Receiving the First Aspen Award.” Aspen Music Festival, http://www.aspenmusicfestival.com/benjamin-britten. Accessed 30 June 2020.

• Bullock, Philip Ross. Rosa Newmarch and Russian Music in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century England. Ashgate, 2009.

• ---. “Untranslated and Untranslatable? Pushkin’s Poetry in English, 1892-1931.” Translating Russia, special issue of Translation and Literature, vol. 20, no. 3, 2011, pp. 348-372.

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• Dostoievsky, Feodor. The Diary of a Writer. Translated by Boris Brasol, Peregrine Smith, 1979.

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• Gasparov, Boris. “Pushkin in Music.” The Cambridge Companion to Pushkin, edited by Andrew Kahn, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 159-173.

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•  Pears, Peter. “Armenian Holiday: A Diary (August 1965).” The Travel Diaries of Peter Pears, 1936-1978, edited by Philip Reed, Boydell Press, 1995, pp. 98-134.

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•  Reed, Philip, and Mervyn Cook, editors. Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten, vol. 5: 1958-1965. Boydell Press, 2010.

•  Straus, Joseph N. “Voice Leading in Set-Class Space.” Journal of Music Theory, vol. 49, no. 1, 2005, pp. 45-108.

•  Wachtel, Andrew. “Translation, Imperialism, and National Self-Definition in Russia.” Alternative Modernities, edited by Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Duke University Press, 2001, pp. 58-85.

•  Wachtel, Michael. A Commentary to Pushkin’s Lyric Poetry, 1826-1836. University of Wisconsin Press, 2011.

•  ---. The Development of the Russian Verse: Meter and its Meanings. Cambridge University Press, 1998.

•  Ward, D. “Pushkin’s Зхо – Sound, Grammar, Meaning.” Studia Slavica, vol. 21, 1975, pp. 377-386.

•  Whittall, Arnold. The Music of Britten and Tippett. Cambridge University Press, 1990.

  August 17, 2020