English composer Benjamin Britten wrote more than 100 songs for voice and piano, many of them arranged in cycles. Britten typically composed his song cycles with a particular singer in mind: more often than not his friend, the tenor Peter Pears. The cycle Songs and Proverbs of William Blake was composed for a particular singer: not Pears this time, but the famous baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who had sung in the premiere of Britten's War Requiem in 1962. Fischer-Dieskau premiered the William Blake songs at the 1965 Aldeburgh Festival. Peter Pears chose the texts for Britten to set, selecting poems from Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, written between 1789 and 1793. Pears also chose some of Blake's "Proverbs of Hell" from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, to be interspersed between the poems. Blake's poems explore humanity's woes and the tensions between innocence and experience, from the bleak misery of the child in "The Chimney Sweeper" to the cold, cruel victory of "A Poison Tree." Britten's musical settings closely follow the text, with both the vocal lines and piano parts setting the mood for each song. Britten's vigorous, agitated setting of "The Tyger," for example, neatly captures the poem's seething energy, while "Every Night and Every Morn" is set like a chorale, emphasizing the poem's spiritual concerns: "God Appears and God is Light/To those poor Souls who dwell in Night." The Proverbs, each only a few lines long, are transitional, leading from one song to the next. This song cycle requires a huge amount of stamina from its vocalist, with extremely long phrases and held notes in uncomfortable portions of the range of a baritone.

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