Jonathan Dove invited Robert Tear to perform Winter Words at the Spitalfields Festival in 2003, after which Tear wrote a set of poems in response to the Hardy poems selected by Britten. Dove then set these to music for Tear to perform. Shakespeare’s words feature in both the songs by John Dankworth and Mervyn Horder; Horder, alias the Second Baron of Ashford, was born in 1910, the son of a doctor who was to be ennobled for ministrations to a series of British monarchs. Sondheim’s incidental music for S. Richard Nash's 1956 play The Girls of Summer is mostly instrumental, although Sondheim wrote a title song with Lena Horne in mind.