Winter Words (song cycle)
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Winter Words, Op. 52, is a song cycle for tenor and piano by Benjamin Britten.
Written in 1954, it sets eight poems by Thomas Hardy about the fleetingness of experience, which contrast brief instances (a boy’s boredom on a long train ride, the creak of an old table, a certain light in the trees in November) against the unfeeling vastness of time. Throughout the cycle Britten juxtaposes bursts of figuration against extended, repetitive chordal patterns.
The closing song, Before Life and After, is one of Hardy's most outspoken declamations on this theme. Over a slow, solemn procession of triadic harmonies, it remembers a time there was . . . when all went well, a primal state before the disease of feeling germed, and yearns for such a time again. The setting of the final lines, which end: How long, how long?, are generally regarded to be among Britten's most haunting passages, and he revisited the work in his late orchestral piece Suite on English Folk Tunes, A Time There Was..., Op.90.
[edit] Settings
- 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, Upway (or The Convict and Boy with the Violin)
- Before Life and After
