This is a lovely and affecting individual song by Benjamin Britten, unknown to the public during his lifetime. The exemplary work of the Britten-Pears musical estate has resulted in an orderly, professional perusal of all the available sketches, individual movements, parts of incomplete projects, and works discarded or held back for various reasons. Much of this music appeared in performance and print in editions that are properly edited and annotated and, where necessary, completed and orchestrated. If It's Ever Spring Again is one of them.

As so many composers who work in the English language have since the time of Thomas Hardy, Britten turned to the evocative verses of this great poet. His first Hardy setting appeared in 1940: It was incidental music to a radio play adaptation of Hardy's Napoleonic epic The Dynasts.

In 1953, contemplating a new song cycle for tenor and piano for his life-partner, Peter Pears, Britten now wrote a song cycle on Hardy texts. Britten named it Winter Words, after Hardy's last volume of poetry, although the cycle actually uses only one poem from that book.

But Britten produced more than the eight songs that he assembled into the cycle of Winter Words. There were two more, this song and another, The Children and Sir Nameless, that he also wrote for possible use in Winter Words. Britten, who was highly conscious of the flow of individual numbers in his cycles and always arranged them in a dramatic shape, no doubt reluctantly decided that this song did not fit into his plan as well as the other eight verses, and so lay it aside.

Its rediscovery thus provides us with a rare commodity, a lovely and evocative single song. It is a song that gently yearns for better times: For spring and summer, if ever they come again into the poet's life, when he can return to those happy times and places, "standing with my arm around her." "We shall do as long we've dreamed to," the poet hopes.

The short opening chords raise a sense of expectation, picked up in the gentle and tentative opening lines for the tenor. These yearnings are fulfilled, if only in dream, by the flowering of both parts, and end in a lovely evocation of summer.

© All Music Guide

Portions of Content Provided by All Music Guide.
© 2008 All Media Guide, LLC. All Music Guide is a registered trademark of All Media Guide, LLC.