Britten’s song cycles form a substantial and important part of his work. The Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo belong to the period when Britten had begun to set foreign languages in an attempt to broaden his musical horizons. It is his first work composed exclusively for Peter Pears and deals with various aspects of love. Written in August 1945, soon after Britten had returned from a tour of German concentration camps with Yehudi Menuhin, The Holy Sonnets of John Donne captures some of the bleak intensity of that experience. In the eight settings of Thomas Hardy, Winter Words, written in 1953, there is no less abundance of the musical invention and imagery found in the earlier cycles, but the textures are generally leaner and more economical.