Peter Pears

For many years Peter Pears served as the defining voice of British vocal music in both opera and song. Benjamin Britten composed fourteen operas and more than fifty songs and cycles expressly for him, and Pears also participated in the premieres of numerous other important English works. One of the three founders of the Aldeburgh Festival, he joined Britten in establishing the Britten/Pears School for Advanced Musical Studies and continued to direct its singing programs until his death.

Pears first intended to become an organist and studied the instrument at Hertford College, Oxford, before enrolling at the Royal College of Music in London as an Operatic Exhibitioner from 1933 to 1935. He later worked with Elena Gerhardt and Dawson Freer. His professional career began in 1934 as a member of the BBC Singers, the ensemble through which he first met Britten.

Their initial recital together took place at Balliol in 1937, after which they toured the United States and Europe with chamber music that included several Britten pieces. On their return they introduced Britten’s Michelangelo Sonnets at Wigmore Hall. Pears made his operatic debut as Hoffmann in Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann at the Strand Theater in London in 1942 and joined the Sadler’s Wells Opera Company the following year, singing lyric tenor leads. By then Britten had begun writing the title role of Peter Grimes for him with support from the Koussevitsky Foundation; the opera received its world premiere at Sadler’s Wells in 1945. Although Pears continued to appear in works by other composers, he and Britten became a permanent artistic partnership that produced many further operas written for Pears over the next decades: the Male Chorus in The Rape of Lucretia (1946), the title role in Albert Herring (1947), Captain Vere in Billy Budd (1951), Essex in Gloriana (1963), Peter Quint in The Turn of the Screw (1954), Flute in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960), and Aschenbach in Death in Venice (1973). He also created Pandarus in Walton’s Troilus and Cressida. In the song repertoire he gave the first performances of Berkeley’s Stabat Mater, Tippett’s A Child of Our Time and Boyhood’s End, and Britten’s Michelangelo Sonnets, Donne Sonnets, and Serenade for tenor, horn, and strings.

A committed student of early music, Pears regularly programmed English lute songs and, with Britten, prepared editions of several Purcell songs. Although chiefly associated with English music and venues, he appeared as soloist at the Holland Festival and the Salzburg Festival.

Pears and Britten necessarily kept the intimate character of their relationship private, yet their lifelong partnership and love affair remains one of the most productive and influential in music history, perhaps exceeded only by that of Robert and Clara Schumann. They are buried beside each other in Aldeburgh.