The social landscape has changed so much that it’s hard to remember how gay relationships worked when commitment could not be affirmed publicly – let alone when they were illegal. Yet, for some 35 years, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears contrived an apparently perfect gay marriage before the concept was invented.
Britten began by accompanying Pears’s lyric tenor in recitals in the late 1930s. He started writing song cycles for him, and then operas: indeed, his tenor parts (most famously, that of Peter Grimes in the captivating opera of the same name) were defined entirely by Pears, making it hard until recently for other tenors to make the music their own.
A number of songs especially written for Pears feature in a 2024 album, Songs for Peter Pears, which received a glowing review in our August 2024 issue.
Other major roles written by Britten for Pears included the title role in Albert Herring (1947) and of Captain Vere in Billy Budd (1951). He also created the role of, Peter Quint in 1954's The Turn of the Screw for his partner and muse, as well as that of Gustav von Aschenbach in the late, great and bleak Death in Venice (1973). The couple's most influential collaboration, though, has to be founding the always-adventurous Aldeburgh Festival, in the beautiful Suffolk coastal town that they had made their home, in 1948.
Their musical partnership was the genesis of, and cover for, their personal relationship.
The Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo were a clear proclamation of love for his singer, veiled only by the Italian words (written by Michelangelo for his own lover), which they conveniently omitted to translate at the first performance in wartime London.
- We asked musicians to name the best British composer of all time - and Britten finished very strongly
Britten was always very proper in public: he spoke in interviews about ‘Peter Pears’ (never just ‘Peter’), and they behaved decorously like ‘a pair of prep school masters’, as the singer James Bowman described them. Their private correspondence was loving, although they also rowed like any married couple. But it’s far from clear that Britten saw the relationship as permanent: he imagined that one day Pears might go off to get married, in which case he confessed he would have to ‘lump it’ – and yet Pears was far more settled and comfortable in his homosexuality than Britten seems to have been.
April 1942: Britten and Pears head back to war-torn England, despite the danger
On 17 April, 1942, the Axel Johnson docked in Liverpool after just over a month at sea. The English port city was the Swedish cargo ship’s final destination on a voyage that had begun in New York, then headed northwards up the North American coast before crossing the Atlantic. With attack by German U-Boat a constant possibility, it was a journey fraught with danger, but one that two of the boat’s passengers knew they had to make. For composer Britten and his Pears, it was time to come home.
When Britten and Pears had travelled in the other direction in May 1939, the two had by no means planned their Stateside stay to be an extended one. Britain’s declaration of war on Germany five months later, however, had brought a change of mind.
'We couldn't be happier'
Though a prison sentence for refusing to serve was by no means a certainty, their life as pacifists would not be made easy should they return to Britain, while in the US, there were countless opportunities to be explored and friendships to make and renew, not least with Britten’s close collaborator, the poet WH Auden. Pears, in fact, was soon declaring that ‘we couldn’t be happier’.
That, though, was surely a case of the royal ‘we’. From the outset, Britten gave indications that not all was well. In early 1940 (the year that produced the orchestration of Chopin's Les Sylphides and the Sinfonia da Requiem among others), the composer suffered a bout of flu that saw his temperature rise to 107 degrees. Auden reckoned this was symptomatic of a longing to be back home.
And in April of that year, Britten himself wrote in a letter that ‘I’m gradually realising that I’m English – and as a composer I suppose I want more definite roots than some people.’ Constant reminders of home – letters from Britain, a road sign with the name ‘Suffolk’ on it and the discovery of a book of poems by George Crabbe describing the East Anglian coastline – intensified those feelings.
'Callow, foul-mouthed and witless': a trying journey home
‘God, how slow and boring,’ was Pears’s description of life on the Axel Johnson as it made its laborious departure from the US in March 1942. His and Britten’s quarters were hot and stuffy, he complained, while the crew consisted of ‘callow, foul-mouthed and witless recruits’ whose constant whistling made concentrating on anything near-impossible.
His partner, however, did find something to occupy his mind. Britten had hoped to bring the scores of two works-in-progress with him onto the ship – a commission from clarinettist and band leader Benny Goodman and a Hymn to St Cecilia setting words by Auden – but both had been confiscated by port authorities for fear that they may contain coded material. Undeterred, he remembered as best he could what he had completed so far of the Hymn, and carried on from there. The result was one of his most sparklingly imaginative choral works.
Even more remarkable, given these most unlikely of circumstances, was the other piece he conjured up on board. Inspired by a book called The English Galaxy of Shorter Poems that he picked up during a brief stop-off in Nova Scotia and equipped with a couple of harp manuals initially bought to facilitate a now-abandoned concerto, Britten wrote a uniquely scored festive sequence for voices and harp. Topping and tailing it on his return to England, he would go on to name it A Ceremony of Carols.
Most of the Ceremony’s texts were, unsurprisingly, of a wintry, yuletide nature. Among them, though, was a ‘Spring Carol’ whose words – ‘the deer in the dale, the sheep in the vale’ and all – instead told of the turn of the seasons, a little hint of the pleasures that would be awaiting Britten and Pears at journey’s end. ‘We shall be arriving at such a heavenly time,’ enthused Pears. ‘April is such a marvellous month – think of seeing real spring again.’