14 great classical composers who also happened to be gay

Great composers who happened to be gay. Picture: Getty

By Rosie Pentreath, ClassicFM London

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From Copland to Corelli, we celebrate some of the greatest LGBTQ+ composers in classical music history.

With Pride season in full swing, we take a moment to celebrate the incredible contributions queer composers have made to the history of classical music.

1. Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)

   Edward Benjamin Britten is one of the finest composers of English operas, choral works, and songs, many of which he wrote for his life partner, tenor Sir Peter Pears.
   Britten started writing music as young as nine, when he wrote an oratorio. He studied under Frank Bridge, John Ireland and Arthur Benjamin among others, and was also a fine pianist.
   His ground-breaking operas, which include Peter Grimes (1945), and The Turn of the Screw (1954) – and his famous War Requiem – tackle contemporaneous issues around psychology and post-war trauma, as well his own homosexuality, which was illegal in Britten’s lifetime.
   Britten founded the Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk with Pears and librettist Eric Crozier.

   

   Sir Benjamin Britten on Aldeburgh Beach. Picture: Getty

2. Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944)

   Ethel Smyth was a prolific composer and an active member of the women’s suffrage movement, and she made no secret of her relationships with women.
   Born in South-East London, Smyth studied at the Leipzig Conservatory and there met composers that included Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Clara Schumann and Brahms. Her best-known works are the opera The Wreckers and her Mass in D.
   Her 1911 song, ‘The March of the Women’, which had lyrics by Cicely Hamilton, was dedicated to movement leader Emmeline Pankhurst – documented to have been a lover of Smyth’s – and became the official anthem of the Women’s Social and Political Union and women’s suffrage activism around the world.
   At the age of 71 Smyth, by all accounts, met and fell in love with Virginia Woolf (who would have been in her 40s at the time). Woolf described it as “like being caught by a giant crab”, for better or worse...

   

   Dame Ethel Smyth. Picture: Getty

3. Francis Poulenc (1899-1963)

   As well as being one of the first openly gay composers full stop, Poulenc also didn’t eschew his sexuality in the context of his religious faith.
   His compositions spanned from intimate chamber sonatas with sublime, twisting melodies and delicate impressionist harmonies (think the 1957 Flute Sonata), to his Piano Concerto and epic one-act opera for soprano and orchestra, La voix humaine.
   Music scholars continue to debate whether or not the diverse range of styles in his music serve as an outward representation of an inner moral conflict in Poulenc.

4. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

   Tchaikovsky was born in Votkinsk, a small town in the Russian Empire, and began composition lessons with Anton Rubinstein in 1861. His great works include his ballets like Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker, and his 1812 Overture.
   He had a disastrous marriage to one Antonina Miliukova in 1877 and attempted suicide. Tchaikovsky was gay at a time when it was illegal in Russia. His marriage was designed to stop people gossiping about his love life – but it turned into a source of misery and torment for both him and Miliukova.
   Tchaikovsky apparently fell in love with his own nephew Vladimir Davydov, a complication that was cut short by the older man’s tragic death from cholera – or another cause if other theories are to be believed – in 1893.
   Listen to a rare recording of Tchaikovsky's voice

   The wax cylinder recording is from 1890

5. George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)

   Handel’s choral and operatic compositions remain among the most influential pieces ever written – from the enduringly popular Messiah, to the operas Rinaldo and Agrippina – not to mention his fine orchestral, chamber and instrumental works.
   The great composer was born in Halle, Germany, and studied music from a young age. He moved to England as an established composer, after English audiences particularly took to his 1711 opera Rinaldo.
   He was believed to have been gay, moving in circles in Italy and London where same-sex desire was accepted. Music historian Ellen Harris leads on the case for Handel’s homosexuality, arguing that his cantatas exhibit a clear homosexual subtext in her book Handel as Orpheus.
   Zadok the Priest – Handel

   The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir perform at Classic FM's 25th birthday concert

6. Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687)

   The operatic composer and violinist Jean-Baptiste Lully worked in the court of King Louis XIV and was an ambitious figure in court and operatic music, dominating French opera in the 17th century.
   As well as being known for rising up influential ranks impressively quickly, Lully is thought to have had quite the colourful private life, embarking on affairs with both men and women – to the extent it got him in hot water with the King.
   Lully died relatively young, succumbing to a fatal infection in a wound on his foot, inflicted by his own conducting stick.

   

   Jean-Baptiste Lully. Picture: Getty

7. Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713)

   Corelli was a contemporary of both Lully and Handel (see above), moving in the same sexually-fluid circles as them. And like them, he was associated with gay clergyman, Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni.
   The Baroque composer and violinist is known for his chamber sonatas and concerti grossi, and has gone down in history for refusing to play a section of Handel’s oratorio, The Triumph Of Time And Truth, because a violin note went higher than Corelli believed appropriate for the instrument.
   Corelli: Christmas Concerto, from The Swingle Si

8. Frederick the Great (1712-1786)

   King Frederick II of Prussia once wrote “Fortune has it in for me; she is a woman, and I am not that way inclined” following a particularly bitter defeat in battle.
   History has documented the King as having an early affair with Peter Karl Christoph von Keith, a page boy of his father Frederick William I’s, as well as Lieutenant of the Prussian Army, Hans Hermann von Katte, whom Frederick William had killed in response to these revelations about his son.
   Frederick the Great composed several concertos and sonatas, and was also a flautist who studied with Johann Joachim Quantz.

9. Aaron Copland (1900-1990)

   New York-born composer, Aaron Copland, was one of the many renowned composition students of Paris Conservatoire’s Nadia Boulanger, whose roster of composition, performance and conducting students pretty much dominated 20th century music – from Astor Piazzolla, Philip Glass and Quincy Jones, to Daniel Barenboim and John Eliot Gardiner.
   Copland, whose best-known works include Appalachian Spring and Fanfare for the Common Man, was a famously private man, but unearthed letters between him and artist Prentiss Taylor indicate an intimate relationship. Copland also didn’t hide the fact he lived and travelled with other men, including photographer Victor Kraft and artist Alvin Ross.
   10-year-old Peter Leung plays Aaron Copland's 'The Cat and the Mouse'

   The child prodigy performed at the Oxford Piano Festival

10. Samuel Barber (1910-1981)

    Unlike Copland, US composer Samuel Barber made no effort to keep his homosexuality out of explicit view and his life partner was composer Gian Carlo Menotti, who he studied with at the Curtis Institute.
    Barber won the Pulitzer Prize for Music twice – in 1958 for his opera Vanessa, and again in 1963 for his Piano Concerto.
    His Adagio for Strings was one of the first works by an American composer to be championed by the indomitable Arturo Toscanini, and featured famously in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film, Platoon.
    ThatCelloGuy performs Samuel Barber's 'Adagio for Strings'

11. Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007)

    Not as much of a household name as his life partner Samuel Barber (see above), Italian composer Gian Carlo Menotti was no less lauded for his works. He was also a Pulitzer Prize-winner, having earned the accolade for his operas The Consul and The Saint of Bleecker Street.
    He founded the Spoleto Festival in the US in 1958, and 10 years later expanded it to the Melbourne Spoleto Festival, now known as the Melbourne International Arts Festival.

12. Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)

    Leonard Bernstein also studied at the Curtis Institute with Barber and Menotti (see above), and although he had an on-again-off-again relationship with actor Felicia Cohn Montealegre and eventually married her, he was openly gay.
    Montealegre herself wrote publicly about it in her book, The Bernstein Letters, “you are a homosexual and may never change – you don’t admit to the possibility of a double life, but if your peace of mind, your health, your whole nervous system depend on a certain sexual pattern what can you do?”.
    And Bernstein’s West Side Story collaborator Arthur Laurents is known to have called Bernstein “a gay man who got married”, stating, “He wasn't conflicted about it at all. He was just gay.”
    West Side Story (1961) – Official Trailer

    Credit: United Artists/The Mirisch Company Seven Arts Productions

13. Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

    In his short life – he died even younger than Mozart, at just 31 – the great Romantic composer Franz Schubert composed 600 Lieder (songs), nine symphonies and numerous other large and smaller-scale works.
    In 1989, music historian Maynard Solomon suggested (controversially at the time), that Schubert’s song lyrics carry the evidence that Schubert was romantically attracted to men – something that has been hotly contested, including by historian Rita Steblin who believes Schubert was “chasing men”. Others have picked up on the former theory more recently, but it seems the Jury is still out.

14. John Cage (1912-1992)

    John Cage – who famously “wrote” 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence to explore concert hall ambience and what music actually means – married artist Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff, the daughter of a Russian priest, in 1935.
    But before that, Cage had had an ongoing relationship with Don Sample, as well as an affair with the wife of architect Rudolf Schindler, Pauline Gibling – so his sexuality was clearly fluid.
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Famous composers' mothers

It’s easy to forget the great composers were ever children – can you imagine Brahms as a young boy, or Tchaikovsky as a toddler? But someone must have told them to eat their greens and dried their tears…

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   1. Beethoven's mother: Maria Magdalena Keverich

   Maria Magdalena Keverich was from a well-to-do family of merchants, councillors and senators. After her first husband died, when Maria was just 18, she met Johann van Beethoven. The pair went on to marry and had three children who survived into adulthood – including the great composer, Ludwig van Beethoven.
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   2. Mahler's mother: Marie Herrmann Mahler

   Marie Herrmann was the daughter of a rich merchant and soap boiler and she married Bernhard Mahler – a man described as having a fiery temper – in 1857. In total the couple had 14 children – one of which was the young Gustav, in 1860 – but eight died in childhood.
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   3. Liszt's mother: Anna Liszt

   Liszt's mother, Maria Anna Liszt, worked as a chambermaid in her youth before marrying Adam Liszt. They only had one child – Franz Liszt. When Adam died, Liszt arranged for his mother to live with him in Paris, where he originally earned money teaching the piano.
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   4. Chopin's mother: Justyna Chopin

   Chopin's mother was a gifted musician in her own right – she played the piano and had a good soprano voice. The young Frédéric Chopin was born in 1810.
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   5. Mozart's mother: Anna Maria Mozart

   Anna Maria married Leopold Mozart in 1747. One historian has said of her: "It was a pure and healthy spirit that reigned in the Mozart household… and Anna Maria must take credit for this. Above all, she was a true mother to her children, who invariably sought refuge with her when their father's strict hand weighed unduly heavily upon them. Wolfgang loved and admired her to distraction." She died when travelling with her family in July 1778.
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   6. Tchaikovsky's mother: Alexandra Andreyevna

   The young Pyotr Tchaikovsky is shown on the far left of this picture, with his mother Alexandra, his sister Alexandra, his brothers Zinaida, Nikolai and Ippolit and his father Ilya. She and Tchaikovsky's father were both trained in the arts, including music. When the young Pyotr had to leave home and his mother to go to boarding school, he was devastated – and the emotional scar of the separations stayed with him for the rest of his life.
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   7. Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn's mother: Lea Mendelssohn Bartholdy

   Lea Mendelssohn Bartholdy was the mother of not one but two great composers – Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn. It was largely thanks to her that her children were so musically talented. A brilliant pianist herself, Lea kicked-off Fanny and Felix's musical education. She was also an advocate for the music of JS Bach, at a time when the composer's music was rarely heard.
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   8. Britten's mother: Edith Rhoda Britten

   Taken around 1914, this charming family portrait shows Benjamin Britten with his mother, Edith Rhoda, and siblings – Charlotte, Robert and Edith.
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    9. Percy Grainger's mother: Rose Grainger

    Percy and Rose Grainger photographed in 1903 in Talma Studios, Sydney. Credit: Grainger Museum collection, University of Melbourne