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This song cycle is perhaps most significant for its chronological position in Britten's catalog: it is the only piece composed between the operas Gloriana, op. 53, and The Turn of the Screw, op. 54. The former had been a royal commission for the coronation of Elizabeth II, and it provided an effective target for Britten's critics. Although well received by audiences, Britten's status as "the most important of living British composers" was resented, and this "pageant" of an opera was deemed insulting to the new monarch and inappropriate for such an affair as the coronation of a new queen. As stated before, Britten took criticism very personally: the opera was never recorded during Britten's lifetime, and the whole situation apparently left him depressed. The next few years were a time of great introspection and of a relative lack of output for the composer.
Winter Words was perhaps a diversion from the perceived failure of Gloriana. The pieces are not flashy, but they have a place among the finest of English songs. The texts, by Thomas Hardy, are well represented by this economy; details that might otherwise have been overly sentimental are set in very stoic relief. The description "Lyrics and Ballads" was used on the title page of the published edition, perhaps as further evidence of a departure from the "pageantry" of Gloriana. Winter Words is also a fine example of the many fine song cycles that Britten composed for Pears and himself to perform together. Though not as renowned as either the Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, op. 22, or The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, op. 34, it displays an understated style that reaches full potential later in The Turn of the Screw and the War Requiem.
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