Benjamin Britten produced an enormous volume of musical works in a wide array of genres, and made singular contributions in many. As a composer of texted music – opera, choral music, and song – he has no peer in the twentieth century. As a composer of English-language-texted music, he has no peer in any century.

Britten's song output consists very largely of fifteen collections, on its own an imposing body of music. Why a study that takes up just three of these works, and why, specifically, those that set the poetry of John Donne, Thomas Hardy, and William Blake? A number of their varying attributes partition this section of his catalogue into subsets, and guided my interest. All are written for solo voice, but four are orchestral while eleven are for a single instrument and voice. In nine of those, that instrument is the piano; the guitar and the harp, respectively, are featured in the remaining two. Eleven, once again, though not the same eleven, set English texts (one of these is a translation from the Chinese); the remaining four set, in order of composition, French, Italian, German, and Russian texts. Of the eleven that set English texts, five are anthologies, gathering texts from different poets, and six set texts of a single poet.

My principal interest was in the overarching designs of these works, in directing my analytical attention, that is, toward the qualities that make them more than assemblages of individual songs, but rather, complete architectures. This made centrally important the need to clarify the distinction between a song collection and a song cycle, since this distinction would turn on precisely the sorts of properties with which I was mainly concerned: those that could bind the songs into coherent wholes. The question of when a group of songs ought to be understood not merely as a collection, but as a cycle, is not at all a simple one, and, in fact, engages a substantial and ongoing debate. I address this question in the opening chapter.

Another factor that influenced my thinking was Britten's reverence for Schubert's and Schumann's song cycles, music that he knew intimately and understood deeply.