10 Must-Hear Classical Works by Gay Composers

 by Emily E. Hogstad  August 29th, 2026

The history of classical music is full of gay composers: men whose sexuality was an open secret, a source of torment, a creative engine, or simply a fact of life they navigated as best they could.

We’ve written before about which composers were gay and how we know.

This list takes a different approach: ten must-hear works by gay composers, chosen for their greatness, emotional power, and, in many cases, their direct connection to the composers’ identities.

From Tchaikovsky‘s devastating final symphony to John Corigliano’s AIDS memorial, these are not just great works by gay composers; they’re great works, period.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky – Symphony No. 6   

Tchaikovsky conducted the premiere of his Symphony No. 6 just nine days before he died in 1893.

He dedicated the work to his nephew Vladimir Davydov, whom surviving letters reveal Tchaikovsky had romantic feelings for.

The final movement – a slow, despairing Adagio lamentoso that ultimately fades into silence – breaks every convention of symphonic form.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

The music, combined with how quickly he died, has led to speculation over the years. Some believe his death wasn’t due to cholera, but rather was a suicide triggered by shame over his homosexuality. Although there are still holdouts, most scholars today believe the cholera theory.

Regardless of his cause of death, the fact that he died nine days after its premiere makes its emotional nakedness impossible to shake.

Camille Saint-Saëns – Symphony No. 3   

In 1875, Camille Saint-Saëns married a former pupil half his age. The couple had two sons, both of whom died in infancy in 1878.

After these devastating losses, he abandoned her. He began decamping to North Africa for extended periods, never explaining. Algeria was famous at the time for being a haven for men with same-sex attractions, and he would return there repeatedly.

Charles Reutlinger: Saint-Saëns, ca 1880 (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale)

His Symphony No. 3 was written a few years later, between 1885 and 1886. It stands as his most impressive achievement, with the organ taking a starring role that makes the work both unique and grandiose.

Reynaldo Hahn – Chansons grises   

Reynaldo Hahn is best remembered today as the lover of Marcel Proust, whom he began dating in 1894.

But even after their romantic relationship fizzled out, their ensuing friendship endured as one of the most artistically vital of the Belle Époque.

Reynaldo Hahn (1906)

Born in Venezuela and raised in Paris, Hahn moved in the most glittering artistic circles of the era, equally at home in both salon and concert hall.

His Chansons grises, settings of poems by Paul Verlaine (himself a queer artist), are among the most exquisite French mélodies ever written – intimate, melancholy, and intricately crafted. They may be small in scale, but they’re emotionally enormous.

Karol Szymanowski – Symphony No. 3   

Karol Szymanowski‘s homosexuality is well-documented in his diaries and correspondence, and his mature works are infused with a sensuality that feels drawn from life.

His Symphony No. 3, completed in 1916 and subtitled Song of the Night, sets a poem by the Persian mystic Rumi for tenor, chorus, and orchestra.

Karol Szymanowski

Polish conductor Piotr Deptuch describes it as “an ecstatic night-time love song in which eroticism and transcendence meld into an indissoluble whole.”

Francis Poulenc – Dialogues des Carmélites   

Francis Poulenc was one of the first major composers to be openly gay. He was also Catholic, and lived with the tension between those two identities.

That tension is arguably a major animating force behind Dialogues des Carmélites, his 1957 opera about a group of Carmelite nuns who choose martyrdom rather than renounce their faith during the French Revolution.

The final scene, in which the nuns are led one by one to the guillotine while singing, is one of the most devastating conclusions in operatic history.

Francis Poulenc

It is a work about faith, fear, and the courage it takes to hold fast to your identity – written by a man who knew something about all three.

Samuel Barber – Adagio for Strings   

Samuel Barber lived for forty years with fellow composer Gian Carlo Menotti, who wrote the libretti for two of his three operas. It was one of classical music’s great creative partnerships – and one of its great love stories.

Barber wrote his Adagio for Strings in 1936, when he was just twenty-six, and he and Menotti were staying together in Austria.

Conductor Arturo Toscanini asked to see the score of the work, then returned it without comment – which Barber perceived as a snub.

But Menotti followed up with Toscanini to clarify what the gesture had meant. As it happened, Toscanini had already memorised the score and scheduled a performance – he was returning the score as a favour.

It would become Barber’s breakthrough piece, securing a place in American culture; it is often performed at high-profile events commemorating national tragedies.

Aaron Copland – Appalachian Spring   

Aaron Copland is often regarded as the great American composer: the man who defined what American classical music sounds like.

His music has often been used in conservative political campaigns, but the irony is that Copland was a gay Jewish man from Brooklyn who was involved with far-left groups during the 1930s and 1940s.

Aaron Copland, 1962

His ballet Appalachian Spring, written in 1944 for Martha Graham, is his most beloved work, and his most quintessentially American.

It depicts a young couple settling on the Pennsylvania frontier, and its central theme – a set of variations on the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts” – has become one of the most recognisable melodies in American music.

Benjamin Britten – Peter Grimes   

Benjamin Britten and tenor Peter Pears were personal and professional partners for nearly forty years, and their relationship was one of the most creatively fertile in music history.

Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears

Pears endlessly inspired Britten. He wrote role after role for his distinctive tenor voice, and the two performed together constantly: an artistic partnership so all-encompassing that it becomes impossible to separate Britten’s music from their love story.

Peter Grimes, which premiered in 1945, was the work that announced Britten as a major operatic voice. It tells the story of a fisherman (played by Pears in the premiere) whose inability to conform to his community’s expectations leads to his destruction.

The parallels to Britten’s own experience as a gay man in mid-century England are not subtle – or accidental.

Leonard Bernstein – Symphony No. 2, The Age of Anxiety  

Leonard Bernstein married actress Felicia Montealegre in 1951. Both went into the marriage with their eyes open about the fact that he preferred men.

Bernstein became one of the most charismatic and commanding figures in American musical life, working tirelessly as a conductor, composer, educator, and celebrity. He spent decades navigating the gap between his public image and his private self, fully understanding that no conservative orchestra boards would ever tolerate hiring an openly gay music director.

Leonard Bernstein

His Symphony No. 2, subtitled The Age of Anxiety, is based on W.H. Auden’s poem of the same name. The poem, itself written by a gay man, grapples with questions about modern alienation, isolation, and the search for connection – the same kinds of issues Bernstein himself had dealt with in his personal life.

The symphony is brilliant and ultimately restless, which feels appropriate; Bernstein never totally resolved the questions about identity that Auden raised.

John Corigliano – Symphony No. 1  

John Corigliano composed his Symphony No. 1 in 1988 as a response to the AIDS crisis, dedicating it to friends he had lost – and was losing – to the epidemic.

By that point the death toll in the American gay community was catastrophic, and the silence from the government and mainstream culture was deafening.

John Corigliano

Its first movement is subtitled “Apologue: Of Rage and Remembrance.”

Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1 is one of the few major orchestral works to emerge directly from the AIDS crisis, and one of the most powerful. Its emotional immediacy makes it a must-hear work.

Conclusion

Gay composers have been present at every stage of classical music history, from the courts of Louis XIV to the concert halls of the 20th century.

Their sexuality shaped their music in ways both direct and oblique – sometimes as a source of anguish, sometimes as a quiet fact of life, and sometimes (as with Corigliano) as an explicit subject.

All of these works can stand on their own; no one needs to know their composers were gay to appreciate them.

But knowing more about their stories can help deepen our connection to composers and music alike.

Shostakovich and Britten: Kindred Spirits Across the Iron Curtain

The year 2026 marks both the 120th anniversary of Dmitri Shostakovich‘s birth and the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the British composer Benjamin Britten. Today, the two composers, who lived on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, are not so often associated together. Yet they were not only friends bound by profound mutual admiration; they also had a remarkable amount in common.

Born only seven years apart, they died within little more than a year of one another, in 1975 and 1976 respectively, both from possibly heart-related conditions. Both achieved fame while still young, and both possessed considerable talents beyond composition: Shostakovich was once an accomplished pianist, while Britten distinguished himself as both a pianist and a conductor. Both were celebrated as cultural treasures in their respective countries and showered with public honours, yet both remained, in different ways, alienated outsiders – Shostakovich repeatedly suffered political persecution and was later afflicted by serious illness; Britten was homosexual at a time when sexual relations between men remained illegal in Britain. Their musical styles may have differed greatly, but both were driven by an intense sense of conviction. Using economical and somewhat conservative musical languages, they transformed wit, bite, natural poetry, profound catharsis, and a wide range of expressions into music.

BBC “Britten the Performer”: Shostakovich Symphony No. 14 and Britten Nocturne, Op. 60 (English Chamber Orchestra, Benjamin Britten)

Britten probably became aware of Shostakovich before Shostakovich encountered his music. In a 1935 letter to a friend, Britten wrote:

“The real musicians are so few & far between, aren’t they? Apart from the Bergs, Stravinskys, Schönbergs & Bridges, one is a bit stumped for names, isn’t one? … Shostakovitch—perhaps—possibly.”

A few months later, he attended a concert performance in London of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. He recorded his reaction in his diary:

“There is a consistency of style & method throughout. The satire is biting & brilliant. It is never boring for a second—even in this form.”

Britten also added, with characteristic sharpness:

“The ’eminent English Renaissance’ composers sniggering in the stalls was typical. There is more music in a page of Macbeth than in the whole of their ‘elegant’ output!”

Living in a comparatively closed cultural environment, Shostakovich may not have properly encountered Britten’s music until the 1950s, and the first Britten work he heard may have been one of the English composer’s most accessible pieces, The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. After admiring one another from afar for many years, the two composers finally met in London in 1960. The Leningrad Philharmonic, conducted by Yevgeny Mravinsky, was touring Britain and presented the British première of Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto with Mstislav Rostropovich as soloist. On that occasion, Shostakovich invited Britten to sit beside him during the concert.

Few written details survive about that first encounter, but subsequent events make it clear that they immediately took to one another and that their respect deepened as they became better acquainted. In a 1963 interview, Britten named Shostakovich as one of the living composers he most admired, alongside Stravinsky, Copland and Tippett. From the 1960s until their deaths, they maintained a regular correspondence across the European continent. Britten travelled to the Soviet Union on six occasions, while Shostakovich made several visits to Britain. Their friendship penetrated the Iron Curtain, bringing a note of sincere human warmth to an otherwise cold political era.

Dmitri Shostakovich (right) and Benjamin Britten examining a score, 1963

In 1966, to mark Shostakovich’s sixtieth birthday, Britten wrote a special essay entitled “Tribute to Dmitri Shostakovich”, expressing the “deep attachment” he felt for Shostakovich’s music. Comparing his own works with those of Shostakovich, Britten described them as:

“so very different from his own, but conceived, many of them, in the same period, children of similar fathers, and with many of the same aims.”

Britten acknowledged that their music sounded very different, yet perceptively identified a deeper affinity between them: directness of expression, moral seriousness, sympathy for outsiders and victims, and resistance to fashionable aesthetic orthodoxies. That same year, Britten travelled to Moscow for Shostakovich’s sixtieth-birthday celebrations, where the two composers attended the première of Shostakovich’s Second Cello Concerto.

Dmitri Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten, 1966

Britten reciprocated the friendship by dedicating his church parable The Prodigal Son of 1968 to Shostakovich. Shostakovich, in turn, dedicated his Fourteenth Symphony of 1969 to Britten. In their correspondence, the two men referred to it as “our symphony”.  

A precious recording preserves a unique document of their friendship. On 14 June 1970, at the Aldeburgh Festival founded by Britten, he conducted the English Chamber Orchestra in the first British performance of Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony. To my mind, it remains one of the most authoritative and affecting recordings of the work. It is music-making in the fullest sense, transcending the limitations of the recording and questions of technical execution. Britten perfectly grasps the caustic irony of Shostakovich’s language and balances it against the music’s piercing bitterness and sorrow. The two soloists associated with the work’s earliest performances, Mark Reshetin and Galina Vishnevskaya, are also close to ideal. Had Shostakovich heard the recording, might even his habitually impassive face have broken into a knowing smile?   

The legendary cellist Mstislav Rostropovich entered Britten’s world alongside Shostakovich. It was Rostropovich who performed the First Cello Concerto at the concert where the two composers first met. He subsequently became both a witness to and a participant in their friendship – he appears frequently in photographs of Britten and Shostakovich together.

Shostakovich later joked that he had suffered because Rostropovich played the First Cello Concerto so well: whenever Britten was particularly moved by the performance, he prodded Shostakovich in the ribs. After the concert, however, it was Rostropovich who made the first approach to Britten, asking him to compose something new for the cello. The result was a succession of works written specifically for Rostropovich: the Cello Sonata, the Cello Symphony and the three Suites for Solo Cello.

This almost became a form of artistic exchange between the two great composers. Shostakovich subsequently wrote his Second Cello Concerto for Rostropovich, while in the final movement of Britten’s Cello Sonata the composer directly invoked Shostakovich’s celebrated musical monogram, D–E-flat–C–B: DSCH in German notation. It is an affectionate tribute that also carries a faint suggestion of friendly artistic rivalry.  

The two composers also seemed to possess an unspoken understanding. It may not have been coincidental that in 1962, both completed works that rank among the crowning achievements of their careers, each centred on war and humanitarian concern. Shostakovich composed his Thirteenth Symphony Babi Yar, using poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Scored for bass soloist, male chorus and large orchestra, it creates an atmosphere of immense, oppressive drama. Its opening movement confronts ethnic hatred through the memory of the 1941 massacre at Babi Yar, from which the symphony takes its title.

Britten, meanwhile, composed the large-scale choral work War Requiem. It interweaves the monumental sonorities of the Latin Requiem with the intimate song-writing in which Britten excelled. While mourning human suffering on a universal scale, the work also focuses on individual tragedy through poems written during the First World War by Wilfred Owen.

Britten: War Requiem   

By the end of the 1960s, the composers’ deteriorating health, particularly Shostakovich’s, and occasional political difficulties made meetings increasingly hard to arrange. In 1971, after an interval of several years, Britten returned to Moscow for what would be his final Soviet visit. Perhaps moved by Britten’s persistence, Shostakovich, after cancelling several proposed journeys due to illness, finally travelled to Britten’s home in Aldeburgh during the summer of 1972 despite his frail health.

There, Shostakovich was shown sketches for Britten’s final opera, Death in Venice, then still in progress. For the intensely private and sensitive Britten, allowing a friend to see an unfinished composition represented an extraordinary mark of trust. It was perhaps the most intimate encounter of their friendship. Shostakovich would return to Britain later that year, when the two men met for the final time.

In August 1975, news arrived of Shostakovich’s death. Archival records show that Britten and Peter Pears wrote a letter of condolence to his widow, Irina, and later invited her to the 1976 Aldeburgh Festival. That year, the festival presented the British première of Shostakovich’s final completed work, the Viola Sonata. Irina attended the performance.

Less than eighteen months after Shostakovich’s death, Britten also died, on 4 December 1976.

Which Composers Were Gay? (And How Do We Know?)

 by Emily E. Hogstad  May 15th, 2024

The history of classical music spans centuries. Over that time, society has had very different ideas about sexual identities (when they verbalized them at all). It goes without saying that it’s unfair to look back in time and breezily apply our modern definition of words like gay, lesbian, bisexual, and the like to historical figures.

And yet. Looking at the historical record, it is clear that many great composers had emotionally and/or physically intimate relationships that didn’t fit into a traditional heterosexual mold, and it feels safe to categorize many of them as falling under the LGBTQ+ umbrella.

So here is a list of 27 composers who may have been queer, gay, or otherwise non-heterosexual.

© wfmt.com

Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687)   

Lully was an Italian-born composer who worked at the extravagant court of Louis XIV. He was a renowned violinist, guitarist, and even dancer.

Lully had romantic relationships with both men and women. He and his wife had six children, and he had a mistress. But he also was attracted to men and became involved with a page at Versailles.

Same-sex relationships were grudgingly permitted at the Palace, as Louis’s brother Philippe, Duke of Orléans, openly preferred the company of men. But Lully’s affair did cause the King to distance himself from him, and the page was imprisoned.

Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713)  

Arcangelo Corelli was famous for his groundbreaking violin technique, as well as his hugely influential compositions.

In 1683 Corelli met a violinist named Matteo Fornari, and the two were inseparable for nearly twenty years.

One of their mutual composer friends actually dedicated two trio sonatas to the couple, and Fornari oversaw the publication of Corelli’s work after Corelli’s death.

George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)   

Handel was one of the best-known composers of the Baroque era, especially famous for his smash-hit oratorios like The Messiah.

Some modern-day musicologists consider him to be LGBTQ+. However, unlike with some composers who never officially came out, we don’t have any record at all of who he might have had a relationship with. It’s possible that he was asexual – or merely deeply preoccupied with his work.

Franz Schubert (1797-1828) 

Schubert was an incredibly prolific composer of piano sonatas, chamber works, and symphonies. When he was alive, he labored away in sickness, poverty, and obscurity. He was only fully appreciated after his death.

In 1989, musicologist Maynard Solomon advanced a theory that Schubert was not straight. The very idea caused a tumult.

However, Solomon might have had a point. Schubert wrote heated affectionate letters to several male friends, roomed with likely-queer friend and poet-collaborator Johann Mayrhofer, and spent most of his time in bohemian, male-centric social circles.

But the most recent research suggests that his queerness is not as clear-cut as with other composers.

Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)  

Chopin’s moody, melancholy music for piano has resonated with audiences for generations.

Chopin famously had a romantic relationship with authoress George Sand in the late 1830s and early 1840s. She was famous for challenging gender roles and assumptions about sexuality; she dressed like a man and had romantic relationships with both men and women.

Tytus Woyciechowski © Wikipedia

However, the fact that Chopin dated George Sand doesn’t erase the fact that he also wrote passionate letters to several male friends, including the Polish activist Titus Woyciechowski, who boarded with the Chopin family as a young man.

Chopin wrote to him about kissing him and about “dirty” or “nasty” dreams that Woyciechowski inspired. For his part, Woyciechoewski named one of his children after Chopin.

If nothing else, the two clearly had a very deep emotional connection, and there’s certainly a homoerotic element to it.

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)     

Saint-Saëns was one of the most famous figures in nineteenth-century French music and one of the most impressive musical child prodigies who ever lived.

When he was 40, he married a 19-year-old woman named Marie-Laure Truffot. They had two sons who died young. After their deaths, he walked out and never talked to his wife again.

He often disappeared for weeks at a time, giving no indication where he’d been afterward. He spent winters in Algeria, a haven for European gay men. He also dressed up in women’s clothes and gave satirical operatic performances in drag in his apartment.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) 

Tchaikovsky wrote some of the most beloved Romantic Era masterworks of all time, and many have wondered if his death from cholera (reported to be caused by drinking an unboiled cup of water) was actually a kind of forced suicide to atone for his homosexuality.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Yosif Kotek

We don’t have enough evidence to endorse the forced suicide theory, but it is very clear that Tchaikovsky was very gay. Many letters exist to his brother Modest in which he shares his various dramatic infatuations and encounters with men he’s attracted to.

After his marriage, instead of going on a honeymoon, he had a nervous breakdown and fled to Switzerland. He wrote his violin concerto while recovering…and initially wanted to dedicate it to his infatuation, the queer violinist Yosif Kotek. (He eventually decided not to.)

“When he caresses me with his hand when he lies with his head on my chest and I play with his hair and secretly kiss it, when for hours on end I hold his hand in my own and tire in the battle against the urge to fall at his feet and kiss these little feet, passion rages with me with unimaginable force, my voice shakes like that of a youth, and I speak some kind of nonsense,” he wrote to his brother.

Adela Maddison (1862-1929)   

As a young woman, British composer Adela Maddison married and had two children.

In the 1890s she fell in love with the music of Gabriel Fauré and began studying with him. She left her husband and children to study in Paris, and she may have had a romantic relationship with Fauré.

She later moved to Berlin and began a relationship with a woman named Martha Mundt, editor of a socialist journal. Historians believe that they had a lesbian relationship.

Siegfried Wagner (1869-1930)   

Siegfried Wagner was the son of Richard Wagner. His father died when he was young and he spent much of his life overshadowed by his mother’s strong personality.

Siegfried Wagner in 1896 © Wikipedia

His first love was gay English composer Clement Harris. While they went on a long ocean voyage, he sketched out his tone poem Sehnsucht (“Longing”). The relationship didn’t last and Harris died young. But Wagner kept a picture of Harris for the rest of his life.

Wagner used his position of power at the Bayreuth Festival to attract queer men. Fearing scandal, when he was forty-five, his mother convinced him to marry a seventeen-year-old Englishwoman named Winifred Klindworth. They had four children between 1917 and 1920.

Winifred turned out to be one of Hitler’s best friends, and after her husband’s death, helped to cement a cultural connotation between Richard Wagner and anti-Semitism that has lasted into the present day.

Reynaldo Hahn (1874-1947)

French composer Reynaldo Hahn had warm feelings of friendship for several female superstars of the French Belle Epoque, extraordinary women like Cléo de Mérode and Liane de Pougy (who he bluntly told upon her marriage: “Goodbye Lianon. I hate married people”).

However, he was romantically attracted to men and had a relationship with Proust for two years. (This despite the fact that he was scornful of homosexuality in his private letters.) The two collaborated on the work Portraits de peintres together.

Later in life, his partner was an actor and singer named Guy Ferrant.

Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944)   

English composer Ethel Smyth was always open about her many female crushes, an intense infatuation with Brahms’s married friend Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, and her adoration for poet Henry B. Brewster. She famously wrote to him, “I wonder why it is so much easier for me to love my own sex more passionately than yours.”

Smyth became a fixture in the British suffrage movement of the early twentieth century…and even, late in life, fell in love with Virginia Woolf!

Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937)   

Composer Karol Szymanowski was so gay that he wrote a two-volume homoerotic novel called Efebos.

Pianist Arthur Rubinstein later remembered witnessing Szymanowski’s frank discussion of his sexual awakening: “Karol had changed; I had already begun to be aware of it before the war when a wealthy friend and admirer of his invited him twice to visit Sicily. After his return, he raved about Sicily, especially Taormina. ‘There,’ he said, ‘I saw a few young men bathing who could be models for Antinous. I couldn’t take my eyes off them.’ Now he was a confirmed homosexual. He told me all this with burning eyes.”

His third symphony, subtitled Song of the Night, is viewed as particularly homoerotic.

Lord Berners (1883-1950) 

Lord Berners was an eccentric English composer, author, painter, and gentleman who was also gay.

In 1932 he fell in love with a daredevil eccentric named Robert Heber-Percy, and the two lived together at Lord Berners’s estate for decades…even, for a few years, with Heber-Percy’s wife and daughter.

Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1884-1920)  

Charles Tomlinson Griffes was an American composer who studied in Berlin and, to pay the bills, worked as a teacher in Tarrytown, New York.

Although his sister destroyed some of his papers, surviving diaries written in German candidly discuss his gay life.

In Berlin, he had a relationship with a student named Emil Joèl. After he returned to America, he had a long-term relationship with a married New York City policeman named John Meyer.

Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (1892-1988)   

Sorabji is a fascinating figure: a wealthy English composer of Indian descent who was intensely private. He was one of the most prolific composers of his generation.

In 1920, while wrestling with his identity, he contacted sexuality expert Havelock Ellis, who helped him come to terms with his queerness. Sorabji dedicated his seventh piano concerto to him.

In the mid-1950s he settled down with Reginald Norman Best, the son of his mother’s friend. Sorabji called him “one of the two people on earth most precious to me”, and the couple’s ashes are buried together.

Henriëtte Bosmans (1895-1952)   

Henriëtte Bosmans was a Dutch pianist and composer who, despite her bisexuality and Jewish ancestry, survived the Nazi occupation.

Henriëtte Bosmans and Frieda Belinfante

She had a relationship with lesbian cellist Frieda Belinfante in the 1920s and wrote works for her.

She later became engaged to a violinist named Francis Koene, but he died before their marriage.

Her last major relationship was with a singer named Noémie Pérugia, who inspired compositions.

Henry Cowell (1897-1965)   

Henry Cowell was an exceptionally inventive American composer, but his career was interrupted by queer scandal.

In 1936 Cowell was arrested for having a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old boy. He made a full confession and was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

Ultimately, thanks to good behavior and testimonials from his family and respected musicians, he got out four years later.

The prison experience was traumatic and seemed to suppress his earlier radical musical tendencies.

He married ethnomusicologist Sidney Robertson Cowell in 1941. She also helped to promote his musical legacy.

Francis Poulenc (1899-1963)   relationships with men.

He sent a score of his work Concert champêtre to his lover, painter Richard Chanlaire, inscribed, “You have changed my life, you are the sunshine of my thirty years, a reason for living and working.”

He tried to marry his friend Raymonde Linossier, but she turned him down and then died in her early thirties, which devastated him. In 1946, a brief relationship with a woman named Fréderique Lebedeff led to a daughter.

Aaron Copland (1900-1990)  

Aaron Copland single-handedly created a quintessentially American sound in works like Appalachian Spring, Rodeo, and Fanfare for the Common Man.

He kept his personal life intensely private, but those in the know were aware he had a series of younger boyfriends, usually artistically accomplished.

His deepest connection seems to have been with violin prodigy and photographer Victor Kraft. When Kraft later married and had a son, Copland became his godfather. He left a large amount of money for his godson in his will.

Samuel Barber (1910-1981)   

The prodigiously talented composer Samuel Barber was studying at the Curtis Institute of Music when he met fellow student Gian Carlo Menotti, who was a year younger than him.

Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti © samuelbarberfilm.com

The two soon became inseparable. They bought a house together in Westchester County in New York, dubbing it Capricorn. It featured separate studios and a shared living and entertaining space.

They lived there together for forty years. When it was sold in 1973, Menotti decamped to Europe.

Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007)   

Menotti was a talented composer in his own right, as well as a librettist and playwright. Although not many of his works are played today, his opera Amahl and the Night Visitors remains a Christmas classic.

Over the decades, his romantic interest wandered, to Barber’s displeasure and even humiliation.

In 1974, he began dating the much younger actor Francis Phelan. Presumably, to camouflage the true nature of the relationship, Menotti adopted Phelan as his son.

That said, Menotti still cared for Barber and was at his bedside when he died in 1981.

John Cage (1912-1992)   

In the mid-1930s, experimental avant-garde composer John Cage met artist Xenia Kashevaroff. They married quickly and were together for ten years.

However, before his marriage, Cage had had same-sex relationships, and after his divorce, he returned to them.

He began dating choreographer Merce Cunningham, who became a creative collaborator as well as his life partner.

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)  

British composer Benjamin Britten was aware of his queerness as a young man and spoke about it to poet W. H. Auden, who encouraged him to embrace it.

Soon afterward, he met a tenor named Peter Pears. He was entranced. From that time on, the two spent their lives in a constant creative and romantic conversation.

In 1974, two years before his death, Britten wrote to Pears, “My darling heart (perhaps an unfortunate phrase, but I can’t use any other) … I do love you so terribly, not only glorious you, but your singing. … What have I done to deserve such an artist and man to write for? … I love you, I love you, I love you.”

Remarkably, upon Britten’s death, Queen Elizabeth II sent a letter of condolence to Pears.

David Diamond (1915-2005)   

American composer David Diamond began his career as a violin prodigy.

He knew he was gay from an early age and never hid it.

He also had a tremendous temper. “I was a highly emotional young man, very honest in my behavior, and I would say things in public that would cause a scene between me and, for instance, a conductor,” he said.

His career hit a high point in the 1940s and 1950s but as modernism became more popular, he was eclipsed. Some also attribute the fading of his career to homophobia — others to his temper that made conductors disinclined to champion his work.

Lou Harrison (1917-2003)   

Lou Harrison realized he was gay when he was in high school, and came out to his family in 1934.

In 1947 he had a nervous breakdown in New York City, in part from dealing with the homophobia of his colleagues. Fellow queer composer John Cage helped him find the mental health care he needed.

After getting back on his feet, Harrison moved to the West Coast and met his lifelong partner William Colvig, an electrician and amateur musician, in San Francisco in 1967.

Colvig helped him build a set of percussion instruments they called the “American gamelan.”

Harrison stayed with Colvig throughout the latter’s struggle with dementia and was at his bedside when he died.

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)   

Leonard Bernstein is sometimes thought of as bisexual, given that he married actress Felicia Montealegre and had three children with her.

However, Montealegre thought differently. She wrote to him before their marriage, “You are a homosexual and may never change. I am willing to accept you as you are…”

His West Side Story colleague Arthur Laurents agreed with the terminology, calling Bernstein “a gay man who got married. He wasn’t conflicted about his sexual orientation at all. He was just gay.”

Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016)   

Composer and accordionist Pauline Oliveros was openly lesbian. She had a romantic relationship with performance artist Linda Montano.

Conclusion

Some people believe it’s unfair to label composers who never publicly “came out” as a particular queer identity.

But keeping quiet about the people they loved does history a disservice, too. It makes generations of classical music seem straighter than it really is, especially since so much history was suppressed due to prejudice. Everyone interested in music history deserves to know what the historical record shows or suggests.

Hopefully seeing how many people in classical music history were or may have been LGBTQ+ will help people to have a fuller understanding of music history, and maybe even of themselves and the queer people in their own lives.

Arvo Pärt

 by Georg Predota  

Weaving Silence and Spirituality

Arvo Pärt, born on 11 September 1935 in Paide, Estonia, is one of the most influential composers of contemporary classical music. Renowned for his distinctive tintinnabuli style, his music resonates with a profound simplicity that transcends cultural and temporal boundaries.

Arvo Pärt

Pärt has crafted a sonic universe that appears to speak to the human soul, blending spiritual depth with structural clarity. On the occasion of his 90th birthday, let us take a closer look at his life and music, both deeply intertwined with spiritual exploration, political upheaval, and an unwavering commitment to a minimalist yet profound musical language.   

Arvo Pärt: Spiegel im Spiegel

Early Life and Career (1935-1971)

Arvo Pärt’s musical journey began in the small town of Rakvere, Estonia, where he moved with his mother after his parents separated. Early experiments with a damaged family piano sparked a lifelong fascination with sound. He began formal studies at the Rakvere Music School in 1945 and graduated from Secondary School in 1954.

That same year, he enrolled at the Tallinn Music School, though his studies were interrupted by military service in the Soviet army from 1954 to 1956. After being discharged due to health issues, he resumed his studies and eventually continued at the Tallinn Conservatory studying composition under Heino Eller.

During this period, Pärt also worked as a sound engineer at Estonian Radio, which exposed him to a wide array of music. His early compositional output was marked by experimentation and innovation, often incorporating techniques that were unprecedented among Estonian composers.

The pivotal work of this early phase was Credo of 1968. It was a controversial piece that fused quotation of Bach’s Prelude in C major with avant-garde techniques, tone clusters, and religious texts. This work marked both a culmination and a turning point, leading Pärt into a period of introspective silence and artistic re-evaluation.  

A Turn to Spirituality (1971-1980)

Following Credo, Pärt experienced a crisis of artistic identity. He distanced himself from modernist compositional techniques and began studying medieval and Renaissance sacred music, particularly Gregorian chant, the Notre Dame school, and early polyphony.

After conversion to the Orthodox Church in 1972, Pärt’s religious belief became a cornerstone of his music. Pärt had composed very little between 1968 and 1976, but he emerged from this silence with a radically new voice.

The young Arvo Pärt

The tintinnabuli style, a term derived from the Latin for “little bells,” is characterised by a two-voice structure. A melodic voice moves diatonically around a central pitch, and a tintinnabuli voice outlines the tonic triad. This creates a hypnotic, bell-like resonance grounded in simplicity and spiritual reflection.

Pärt described tintinnabulation as “an area I sometimes wander into when I am searching for answers in my life, my music, my work. In my dark hours, I have a certain feeling that everything outside this one thing has no meaning.”  

Refining Tintinnabuli and Emigration

As Pärt matured, tintinnabuli evolved, and he began to incorporate more intricate variations into his music. In large-scale settings, Pärt assigned distinct key areas to characters, used punctuation-based rhythms, and aligned musical phrasing with the biblical narrative. This reflected his philosophical approach to music as a sacred, meditative act rooted in what he called an “economy of expression.”

Violinist Gidon Kremer describes it as “a cleansing of all the noise that surrounds us.” Pärt distinguished this reductionism from mere simplification, suggesting a spiritual discipline underlying the music. According to Pärt, the melodic voice represents the flawed, earthly world, while the tintinnabula voice offers stability and redemption.

In the late 1970s, Pärt faced increased censorship in Soviet Estonia. He emigrated to Vienna with his wife and sons in 1980, and a year later moved to West Berlin. Berlin became a creative hub for Pärt, as he forged crucial professional relationships.  

Arvo Pärt: Berliner Messe

Later Works and Legacy (2010-Present)

The ECM New Series recording Arbos (1987) introduced Pärt to a broader international audience. By the late 1990s, his music had reached iconic status in the classical world and beyond. In his later years, Pärt allowed greater freedom in his compositional process, and he began drawing inspiration from sculpture and architecture.

He received high-profile commissions, including Adam’s Lament (2010), based on the mystical writings of St. Silouan the Athonite. This work was staged by director Robert Wilson and earned a Grammy Award for its ECM recording in 2014.

The young Arvo Pärt

Though Pärt avoids overt political messaging, he has made subtle yet profound ethical statements. Even though he no longer composes for film, his music appears widely in cinema and television. Fratres and Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten have featured in There Will Be Blood, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Fahrenheit 9/11, and The Young Pope, further increasing his global profile.

Pärt has received 13 honorary doctorates, multiple Grammy Awards, Classic Brit Awards, and countless international prizes. In 2010, Pärt and his family founded the Arvo Pärt Centre in Laulasmaa, Estonia. Originally envisioned as an archive, it expanded into a cultural centre featuring a concert hall and Russian Orthodox chapel.  

Arvo Pärt: Symphony No. 4 “Los Angeles”

Controversies

While Pärt’s music enjoys widespread popularity, it has not escaped criticism. Some detractors label it “naive and repetitive” or “sentimental holy minimalism,” arguing its simplicity lacks the complexity of modernist works.

However, as composer Steve Reich has observed, “Pärt is completely out of step with the zeitgeist and yet he’s enormously popular, which is so inspiring.” And others have asserted that the power of tintinnabulation lies in its “ascetic rigour and apparent simplicity,” which belies a sophisticated interplay of structure and emotion.

Recent scholarly attention, as seen in works like Arvo Pärt: Sounding the Sacred (2021), probes the “historical, spiritual, and sensory aspects” of Pärt’s sound, demystifying its emotional weight through material analysis. The 2005 publication Arvo Pärt in the Mirror, compiled by Enzo Restagno, and the 2010 conference “The Cultural Roots of Arvo Pärt’s Music” reflect growing academic interest in his technical and philosophical contributions.

Conductor Tõnu Kaljuste, a longtime collaborator, has praised the “dramatic directness” of Pärt’s later compositions, which blend piety with exhilaration. Pärt’s music, with its emphasis on silence and simplicity, offers a counterpoint to the chaos of modern life. As he stated, “How can one fill the time with notes worthy of the preceding silence?” This question encapsulates his aesthetic, where silence is “like fertile soil, awaiting our creative acts.”   

Conclusion

Arvo Pärt

For Arvo Pärt, music is a dialogue with the divine, a rejection of nationalistic inspirations for universal spiritual ones. His legacy lies in his ability to distil complex emotions into simple, resonant sounds, creating music that speaks to both the sacred and the secular.

His tintinnabuli style, born from personal and artistic crisis, has redefined contemporary classical music, offering a sanctuary of stillness in a very noisy world. Through his unwavering commitment to purity and spirituality, Pärt has crafted a body of work that not only endures but continues to transform listeners, inviting them to find meaning in the silence between the notes.

Pärt never pandered to popular taste, but it is the result of a philosophy towards music and life. As the composer summarises, “Time and timelessness are connected. They represent the instant and eternity struggling within us.” For many, it fulfils a deep human need that has nothing to do with fashion.

Arvo Pärt’s artistic journey is one of profound personal transformation, musical innovation, and spiritual searching. From avant-garde beginnings to sacred minimalism, from political exile to global acclaim.