The Poet's Echo

Britten's song cycle The Poet's Echo, a setting of six poems by Pushkin (1799–1836), was composed in August 1965 at the Composers’ Colony for Creative Work in Dilizhan, a spa town about 60 miles north of the Armenian capital. The work has been seen as the most obvious expression of Britten's Russian affinities and provides further evidence of his remarkable sensitivity to language, even language of which his formal understanding remained rudimentary. The explicit ‘Russianness’ of the work is exceptional both in terms of his own output (his only other setting of Russian poetry was a three-line translated extract of Yevtushenko's ‘Lies’ in Voices to Today, also composed in 1965) and that of all other English composers up to that point with an interest in Russian music. Narratives of its genesis, shaped largely by Pears's vivid diary of their visit to Armenia, have tended to emphasise these features, together with the spontaneity of the work's composition in Dilizhan's idyllically beautiful natural landscape and the unanimously warm reception it received from its first Russian listeners. Yet Britten's setting of Pushkin can also be seen as a more calculated gesture, representing his response to the creative challenge of producing an authentic and highly condensed gesture of homage to Russia's greatest poet in a language with which he was unfamiliar, coupled with an intimate expression of some of the preoccupations at the heart of his creative personality.

Britten was already considering a Russian vocal setting for Vishnevskaya by 1963, two years ahead of his Armenian visit, but the first documentary reference to setting Pushkin comes instead from Boosey & Hawkes, when Rufina Ampenoff wrote: ‘Your interest in setting some Russian poetry to music is very much in my mind and I have ordered a selection of Pushkin poems in Russian with an English translation. I have also ordered a collection of poems by Evtoushenko.