Box Turtle Bulletin

Born On This Day, 1910: Peter Pears

(d. 1986) Pears described his childhood as a happy one. His musical talent, as a pianist and vocalist, was well appreciated at his public school in West Sussex, where he played leading roles in school productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operas. He was a good cricketer and he was pious. He had considered a calling for the priesthood, but that came at a time when he was also becoming aware of his homosexuality. He was never able to reconcile the two, so music became his vocation. Singing won out over the piano after he heard the tenor Steuart Wilson singing the part of the Evangelist in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. He enrolled at the Royal College of Music in London, but having so little financial resources to live on, he soon left to take a paying job at the BBC as a member of a small vocal ensemble.

At about 1936, Pears met through a mutual friend a young, promising composer by the name of Benjamin Britten. Their acquaintanceship moved toward friendship, then a musical collaboration accompanied by even closer friendship (though still a platonic one). Britten began writing music expressly for Pears and encouraged Pears to take his singing more seriously. Their first joint concert came in 1938, in a song recital benefit for Spanish Civil War refugees. In 1939, Pears accompanied Britten on a trip to Canada and New York, where their friendship and professional collaboration blossomed into a full-blown love that would last until Britten’s death in 1976. They remained in New York and California as war raged across Europe, but by 1942, they felt compelled to return to England. As committed pacifists, they successfully applied as conscientious objections. Pears joined Sadler’s Wells Opera Company, and his growing operative capabilities influenced Britten would compose his opera, Peter Grimes, around Pears. In particular, Britten changed his opera’s central figure from a menacing baritone to a more ambiguous (“neither a hero nor a villain”) tenor to match Pears’s voice.

Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears outside Aldeburgh Parish Church at the first Festival, June 1948.

Peter Grimes opened in 1945 to critical and popular acclaim, although its production opened fissures within Sadler’s Wells due to not-so-subtle homophobia and complaints of favoritism. Britten, Pears and soprano Joan Cross left Sadler’s Wells to form the English Opera Group, dedicated to commission and produce new English operas and other oratory works. While touring England in a production of Britten’s comic opera Albert Herring, Pears and Britten decided to buy a home in Britten’s home town, the small seaside town of Aldeburgh in Suffolk. There, they launched the Aldeburgh Festival, first as an annual festival, then as a year-round venue. Britten premiered new works at the festival nearly every year for the rest of his life. The vast majority of those works were written with Pears in mind.

In 1962, the pinnacle of Pears’s and Britten’s career came with the premiere of Britten’s War Requiem at the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral. The premiere was a success, and the 1963 recording, released amidst Beatle-mania, was a surprise best-seller. Pears also originated roles in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Billy Budd, Owen Wingrave, and Death in Venice, the latter of which Pears premiered at his debut Metropolitan Opera performance in New York at the age of 64.

Pears’s career was by no means dependent on Britten writing parts for him. Pears was recognized for his interpretation of works by Gustav Holst, Edward Elgar, and, especially, of Bach’s two Passions. Pears’ voice has been described as not “pretty”in the traditional sense. “It was somewhat dry, occasionally unsteady, reedy and almost instrumental in timbre — but he used it with agility, acuity, sophistication and a thespian’s gift for characterization. And the voice proved remarkably durable.”

Pears’s career continued after Britten’s death in 1976. He was awarded the Queen’s Jubilee Medal in 1977, knighted in 1978, and awarded the Royal Opera House’s Long Service Medal in 1979. His singing career ended with a stroke in 1980 shortly after his seventieth birthday, but he continued to work as an active director of the Aldeburgh Festival and taught at the Britten-Pears School right up until the day he died of a heart attack in 1986.