Winter Words, Op.52 (1953)

At Day-close in November

Midnight on the Great Western (or The Journeying Boy)

Wagtail and Baby (a Satire)

The Little Old Table

The Choirmaster’s Burial (or The Tenor Man’s Story)

Proud Songsters (Thrushes, Finches and Nightingales)

At the Railway Station (or The Convict and Boy with the Violin)

Before Life and After

Britten’s Hardy settings in Winter Words are so economical, so cryptic in some cases and so (apparently) naive in others that their relevance to what is most essentially of himself is not immediately apparent. Midnight on the Great Western and At the Railway Station, two of the most vividly presented songs in the collection, are clearly about the innocence of childhood. But it is only in the last of them, Before Life and After - beginning with the words “A time there was” which Britten was to attach as a subtitle to his Suite on English Folk Tunes more than twenty years later in 1974 - that the composer reveals the extent, and the intensity, of the thinking behind the cycle. The observations scattered through the seven preceding songs are here drawn together into a lament on the loss of a golden age.

The first song, At Day-close in November, sets the wind-swept winter scene and, although it touches on some of the ideas that are to emerge later, is more specific in its D minor harmonies than in its vaguely uneasy sentiments. One of those ideas is particularised and developed in Midnight on the Great Western, where the steam-whistle sounds echoing intermittently from the first bar to the last, the jolting rhythms in the piano part and the wandering vocal line are appropriately naive images in a song about childhood innocence. Wagtail and Baby, with its prettily fluttering piano part, is an observation through a child’s eyes of even nature’s awareness of the loss of that innocence in adult humanity.

The next two poems must have been chosen at least partly for their contrasted musical opportunities, resulting in the rhythmically unpredictable onomatopoeic creaking in The Little Old Table and the extended fantasy on “Mount Ephraim” in The Choirmaster’s Burial. Proud Songsters reflects in its exuberant bird-song imagery nature’s abundant self-renewal. The innocently compassionate boy with the violin in At the Railway Station is a natural musician too, his playing idiomatically represented in the single-stave piano part and so inspired as to liberate the convict’s imagination from captivity. Freedom does not last long however. Before Life and After both postulates a time “when all went well” and, clinging to the curiously solid texture of the piano part, appeals for its restoration in the D major that was missing in the first song in the cycle.