Beware! Three Early Songs

{{Short description|Song cycle by Benjamin Britten}}

{{Use dmy dates|date=April 2022}}

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Beware! Three Early Songs is a song cycle for voice and piano composed by Benjamin Britten and set to texts by Herbert Asquith, Robert Burns and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

"Beware!" and "O that I had ne'er been Married" were composed in 1922, and are considered examples of Britten's juvenilia, as they were composed at the age of 10. "Epitaph: The Clerk", is a setting of the first verse of the poem "The Volunteer" by Herbert Asquith. It was composed in 1926. The pieces were revised in 1968 and published in 1985.{{cite web|title=3 Early Songs|url=http://www.brittensongs.org/collection/3-early-songs/|publisher=Britten Songs|access-date=11 January 2020}} Britten mistakenly believed that "Epitaph: The Clerk" was written by Walter de la Mare when he was revising Tit for Tat, his setting of five pieces by De La Mare, in 1968.{{cite web|title=Britten Songs Volume 1|url=https://www.chandos.net/chanimages/Booklets/ON4071.pdf|work=Britten Songs Volume 1 liner notes|publisher=Chandos Records|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210112092618/https://www.chandos.net/chanimages/Booklets/ON4071.pdf|access-date=12 January 2020|archive-date=2021-01-12}} The pieces were compiled into this collection by Britten when he was reviving Tit for Tat and Five Walztes (sic), two early compositions from 1926. Rudyard Kipling's "Fuzzy Wuzzy", composed between 1922 and 1923, was revised at the same time, but remains unpublished.{{cite web|title=BTC21 Fuzzy Wuzzy|url=http://www.brittenproject.org/works/BTC21|work=Britten Thematic Catalogue|publisher=Britten Thematic Catalogue|access-date=12 January 2020}}

Britten's biographer, David Matthews, wrote of "Beware" and "O that I had ne'er been Married" that it was "a little disconcerting to find the texts of both of these songs are warnings against women".{{cite book|author=David Matthews|title=Britten: Centenary Edition|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=jVcrDwAAQBAJ|date=15 October 2013|publisher=Haus Publishing|isbn=978-1-908323-41-5|page=10}} Graham Johnson wrote that of Beware that for an 8 or 9-year-old "to write music that is this direct, this aware of the vocal line and potential of the human voice is almost a Mozartian feat".{{cite book|author=Graham Johnson (musician)|title=Britten, Voice and Piano: Lectures on the Vocal Music of Benjamin Britten|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=P0g4DwAAQBAJ|date=3 October 2017|publisher=Taylor & Francis|isbn=978-1-351-21820-7|page=31}}

"O that I had ne'er been Married" was performed by Peter Pears with accompaniment from pianist Roger Vignoles on a Thames Television broadcast from the Britten Pears Foundation on 29 November 1976, though pre-recorded on 20 May that year.{{cite web|title=BTC41 O That I'd Ne'er Been Married|url=http://www.brittenproject.org/works/BTC41|work=Britten Thematic Catalogue|publisher=Britten Thematic Catalogue|access-date=12 January 2020}}