Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin

Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin (Moscow, 1799 – St Petersburg, 1837) was the Russian poet whose work has drawn Russian composers most strongly. His appeal to music rests on two factors: the breadth and variety of his characters, and the purely musical quality of his language. A writer of prose, verse and verse dramas, he was able to inhabit characters and temperaments of great diversity.

Steeped in French and English literature, with particular attention to Shakespeare and Byron, he combined the sophistication of high society in Moscow and St Petersburg with a deep attachment to the Russian countryside, its legends and its fairy tales. Liberal in outlook, he was always under suspicion from the authorities and spent six years of his short life in exile in the provinces. His correspondence, lively, irreverent and sardonic in tone, is reflected in works such as Graf Nulin and The Queen of Spades, whereas in other poems and in dramas such as Boris Godunov, The Miserly Knight and Mozart and Salieri, which have a profound sense of compassion, that irony disappears. In these later works the influence of Shakespeare is evident.

In his own language, Pushkin freed Russian from the juvenile conventions of earlier poetry and achieved a simplicity and frankness of expression that has scarcely any parallel outside ancient Greece. Although his ear was not trained in music proper, he had a singular instinct for combining and contrasting vowels, and for the richness of Russian's liquid, sibilant and guttural consonants, while preserving a naturalness that gives his poetry and prose an almost conversational character.

His musical trajectory begins with his contemporary Glinka, who set the fairy tale Ruslan and Lyudmila. Dargomyzhsky also chose a fairy tale and later The Stone Guest, a work with which he attempted a style that Cui called 'melodic recitative'. Mussorgsky took the historical drama Boris Godunov; Rimsky-Korsakov, two fairy tales and one of the dramatic scenes, Mozart and Salieri. Tchaikovsky drew on the verse novel Eugene Onegin, the historical romance Mazepa and the sardonic tale The Queen of Spades; Rachmaninov, on The Gypsies. Stravinsky turned The Little House in Kolomna into the opera Mavra, and Glière and Asafiev wrote ballets based on his work. Medtner's forty-odd settings show both the fascination these poems exert and the difficulty of doing them justice.

The poet's own life has also served as the subject of later operas, such as Shekter's Pushkin in Mikhailovskoye and Kobekin's Prophet: a Pushkinian triptych, which incorporates fragments of two of the 'little tragedies'. His legacy is twofold: he transformed the Russian literary language and, at the same time, offered composers a repertoire of texts whose musicality continues to demand respect.