ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a survey that included Benjamin Britten's youthful settings of, among others, William Blake and Walter de la Mare where both of those poets employed an authentically English tone of voice as the composer's starting point. Britten's incomparable contribution to the catalogue of Thomas Hardy song settings is followed by Canticle II – Abraham and Isaac, a setting of a medieval miracle play from Chester where the music, for all its biblical background, seems firmly set in an English landscape. Songs and Proverbs of William Blake was the only one of the works written with Fischer-Dieskau's voice in mind that was also dedicated to the singer. In the opening proverb the 'nakedness of woman' introduces an unremittingly bleak picture of London and its benighted inhabitants, which eventually culminates in that powerful phrase about the 'youthful Harlot's curse'.
