Winter Words

Benjamin Britten and Thomas Hardy lived in different times but shared a generally dark view of life. And though the eight Hardy settings that comprise Britten’s song-cycle Winter Words do offer moments of lightness, they unfold like a 20th-century response to Schubert’s Die Winterreise—as a journey through an icily bleak English landscape haunted by a sense of loss, regret and loneliness. Written in 1953 for tenor and piano, it’s more properly a song collection than a cycle, with no overarching narrative. But the individual songs are jewels of story-telling, done on spare terms with a powerful simplicity that mirrors the way Hardy takes straightforward observations of the everyday and makes them meaningful. This is a world of solitary children on Victorian railway stations (where the piano writing recreates the eerie whine of engine whistles and the chug of pistons); of a choirmaster denied the music he wanted at his burial (though compensated by an angelic choir wafting him to heaven); of a wooden table whose persistent creak reminds the poet of better days; and above all, of departed innocence—summed up by a concluding song that yearns for a time “before the dawn of consciousness” when “none suffered sickness, love or loss”. These are, in fact, recurring themes in Britten’s work; and he presents them here with a peculiar sharpness that gives Winter Words a central, almost emblematic status in his output.