Anon in Love
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Anon in Love is a cycle of six songs by William Walton, originally for tenor and guitar, setting anonymous poems from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The cycle was commissioned by the tenor Peter Pears and the guitarist Julian Bream and first performed at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1960. Walton later arranged the cycle for tenor and small orchestra. A version for voice and piano was made by the musicologist Christopher Palmer and premiered after the composer's death. All three versions have been commercially recorded.
For most of his career Walton had been chiefly associated with orchestral and choral music. His juvenilia included four songs setting words by Swinburne (1918) and he adapted three spoken numbers from Façade as songs for voice and piano (1932); his music for the 1936 film of As You Like It included a setting of Amiens' song "Under the Greenwood Tree", and for a 1942 BBC radio play Christopher Columbus he set a lyric by Louis MacNeice, but these were until 1960 his only solo songs from a professional career of four decades.[1]
In 1959 the tenor Peter Pears and the guitarist Julian Bream, who were giving joint recitals at that time, approached Walton to write a new set of songs for them. Pears was known among other things for his performances of the English lute song repertory of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and for his appearances in the operas of his life partner Benjamin Britten.[2] He suggested to Walton that the new work could have the character of "a one-man opera". The idea appealed to Walton, who turned to Christopher Hassall, his librettist for his one full-length opera Troilus and Cressida, to provide the lyrics for him to set.[2]
Hassall selected six poems from Gerald Bullett's anthology The English Galaxy of Shorter Poems. All were from the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries and all were by unknown writers. Reflecting that, Walton gave the cycle the title Anon in Love. The first three songs have lyrics from the Elizabethan age and are more chaste in tone than the last three, which are later and bawdier.[3]
