The Choirmaster’s Burial from Winter Words (1953)

Batter my heart from The Holy Sonnets of John Donne (1945)

The Choirmaster’s Burial from Winter Words (1953)

Proud Songsters from Winter Words (1953)

Unlike Schubert and Strauss, Britten exercised a strict quality control when it came to choosing texts for his songs. His taste in this respect, though determined ultimately by his own emotional and creative concerns, was no doubt influenced by his early friendship with W. H. Auden, whose verse inspired the earliest of the six one-poet song cycles with piano. Certainly, it was Auden who persuaded Britten to take John Donne seriously. Although, according to Peter Pears, the composer had planning a Donne cycle “for some time,” he actually got to work on the Holy Sonnets just two days after his return from a harrowing concert tour he and Yehudi Menuhin had undertaken for survivors of the recently liberated German concentration camps. The experience, though not directly related to the subject matter of the sonnets, seems to be reflected in the uncompromising manner of some of the settings, not least in the unremittingly percusive piano ostinato and dramatically coloured vocal line of Batter my Heart.

Britten’s next song cycle after The Holy Sonnets of John Donne was Winter Words on verse by Thomas Hardy, the choice of texts in this case having much to do with the evocative musical echoes in the poems. The cleverly characterised Choirmaster’s Burial (or The Tenor Man’s Story) enshrines a fantasy on the hymn-tune “Mount Ephraim,” while Proud Songsters, the next song both here and in the cycle itself, celebrates in its exuberant bird-song imagery nature’s abundant self-renewal.