Cameron Pyke, Benjamin Britten and Russia

H-Music Reviewed Elsewhere: Cameron Pyke, Benjamin Britten and Russia.

Discussion published by Lars Fischer on Wednesday, January 17, 2018

Cameron Pyke. Benjamin Britten and Russia. Woodbrige: The Boydell Press, 2016. xvi + 367 pp. $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 9781783271139.

Pyke examines the origins and development of Britten’s interest in Russia over more than fifty years, from Britten’s first documented acquisition of a Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky score in 1925, toPraise We Great Men, a piece left incomplete at the time of Britten’s death that he intended for Mstislav Rostropovich to conduct in exile in America.

Various aspects of Britten’s interest in Russia ... have been the subjects of previous research. Pyke ... nevertheless argues that the full scope of Britten’s engagement with Russian culture has escaped scholarly attention until now. To redress this imbalance, Pyke explores not only Britten’s relationships to Shostakovich, Rostropovich, and Vishnevskaı͡a, but also to Tchaikovsky, Sergey Prokofiev, and Igor Stravinsky as well as Britten’s initial contacts with Russian music as a young man, the trips Britten and Pears made to Russia between 1963 and 1971, the impact of Russian performance practice, and the reception of Britten’s music within the political context of the Soviet Union. The book is organized largely by composer relationships, with chapters for Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky. Two chapters delve into Britten’s relationship with Shostakovich, while discussions of Britten’s Russian trips and performance practice considerations each receive their own chapters. ...

Pyke reads Britten’s enthusiasm for Russian music, particularly Tchaikovsky, as a “conscious reaction” and “a reassertion” of the pre-World War I “musical Russophilia which cast a lingering shadow over [Britten’s] childhood and adolescence” (p. 7). Britten thus saw Russian music as an exotic “Other,” attractive but distant enough to remain a “non-threatening” influence (p. 7). Pyke reiterates this idea throughout the course of his argument. ...

To Pyke, Britten’s early interest in Shostakovich was based on selective musical appeal reinforced by the extra-musical factor of Shostakovich’s perceived “Russianness” (p. 83). ... By the 1960s, Britten’s interest in Shostakovich focused on a wider range of music and extra-musical influences: their parallel status as preeminent composers in their respective nations, empathy for Shostakovich’s uneasy relationship with the Soviet political establishment, a shared interest in chamber music, and the willingness to communicate private sentiments in a “public” work while eschewing avant garde serialism. According to Pyke, Shostakovich’s “Russianness” was no longer a controlling factor. ... until World War II ... Britten saw Stravinsky’s neoclassical works as a counter to the perceived provincialism of British composers such as Arnold Bax and Ralph Vaughan Williams. After 1949, Britten and Stravinsky parted ways over stylistic matters as well as personal insecurity and professional jealousy. ...

To document the breadth and depth of topics addressed in this monograph, Pyke draws upon the full

Citation: Lars Fischer. Reviewed Elsewhere: Cameron Pyke, Benjamin Britten and Russia. . H-Music. 01-17-2018. https://networks.h-net.org/node/113829/discussions/1147473/reviewed-elsewhere-cameron-pyke-benjamin-britten-and-russia Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Music text of Britten’s diaries from 1928–1938, Britten’s collection of miniature and full scores of Russian music, correspondence in the Britten-Pears Foundation Archive and Library, National Archives material relating to the Foreign Office and British Council, a series of articles published about Britten in the Soviet Union between 1963–1973, and interviews with those who worked with or were close to Britten and/or Shostakovich, many of which are included as appendices. Pyke also refers to much contemporary Britten scholarship, particularly those publications that appeared for Britten’s birth centenary in 2013. This extensive documentation is one of the book’s strengths. Pyke is skillful in weaving this abundance of information into the body of the text without slowing the pace of his writing. Only the number of footnotes on each page gives a clue to the careful integration of sources.

Pyke delivers on his promise to bring together the different strands of Britten’s lifelong engagement with Russia. While not the last word on the subject, Pyke’s wide-ranging exploration touches on broad political trends as well as specific compositional details, successfully placing Britten’s “Russophilia” in historical context.

Christopher Little, Notes 74, 2 (2017), 246–248.