Burgess’s setting from 1951 of Sonnet 116 by Shakespeare is a reflective and sombre piece for solo voice and piano. Composed for Barbara Beck (a singer) the Sonnet examines love in terms of what it is not:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
That alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

The composition was later found by Barbara’s husband John Beck (1914-2014), along with Burgess’s harmonica. John and Barbara Beck were neighbours and friends to Lynne and Anthony Burgess in Adderbury, Oxfordshire, when Burgess was teaching English at Banbury Grammar School in the early 1950s. The manuscript, now in the collection of the Burgess Foundation, is one of the earliest surviving examples of Burgess’s music.

The song was first performed by Zoe Milton-Brown (soprano) and Benjamin Powell (piano) at the Burgess Foundation in November 2014, and later broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

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