Benjamin Britten

British foremost composer who helped revive interest in opera through his "Peter Grimes," 1945 and other works, including compositions for motion pictures.

He studied and from age seven and from age 14, composed music that was straightforward and conservatively modern with a dramatic flair. In 1937, then 24 years old, he made his mark outside England with the premiere at the Salzburg Festival of his "Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge," a work of stunning brilliance.

The son of a dentist, Britten was raised in the seaside town of Lowestoft. He went to boarding school and later fell into the raffish company of W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood in the London '30s. According to his letters, the gay writers took him to bath houses and urged him "to decide something about my sexual life." Neither was able to crack his physical reserve, nor was his relationship with the tenor Peter Pears consummated until they reached a hotel in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in June 1939.

For most of Britten's life, homosexual contact between consenting adults was an imprisonable offense. It was during Britten's time in America during World War II that his relationship with Pears deepened to become a nearly 40-year partnership. They were baited by homophobes among their colleagues and taunted by other musicians over their pacifism and socialism. Becoming hyper-sensitive to criticism and paranoid about his privacy, Britten was a timid but deeply ambitious man, fortified in his resolve by the two people who loved him most, his mother and his lover. When his adored and adoring mother died in 1937, he lost "the grandest mother a person could have." It was within weeks that Pears entered his life. It was noted that Pears, a lyric tenor, had a voice "exactly like Britten's mother."

Pears was the active partner, and the one with a roving eye. Britten never wavered in his devotion and was often fearful that his lover may stray, though his love was essentially more emotional than carnal.