Reading the letters of Benjamin Britten and his life partner Peter Pears makes me lonely. Written across their 39-year relationship, they’re – on the whole – a chronicle of the times they spent apart. Pears, mostly, off doing concerts and writing home to the often pining composer. Britten, more passive, replying. Missing him. I’ve heard them called love letters. Are they? There’s certainly a boyish passion in the early days. Two unconfused young men; sexually energised and frank about their desire for each others’ bodies (“I shall never forget a certain night in Grand Rapids”). There are pet names (“pussy-cat”) and Coward-esque declarations of devotion aplenty, all giving way to the pair’s yearning to be together. There is love here, for sure. Deep, erotic, insistent love. But there is something else. A sense of lives becoming intertwined. Careers converging, then merging. As much business chat, professional gossip, medical advice and travel planning as love. And I suppose, if I’m honest, that’s what makes me feel lonely. I ache for what these letters depict: the shared life. Love, and the rest, together. When US soprano Lucy Schaufer asked me to make a song cycle based on these texts for the Cheltenham music festival, I sensed she – like me – was drawn to their intimacy. There is something voyeuristic, forbidden, even kinky, about reading another person’s private romantic correspondence – no matter how academically significant the reason. (We know the couple agreed to publication before their deaths, but still – they couldn’t have imagined they’d be published when they first wrote them!) I had already plundered the Britten/Auden letters with the playwright Mark Ravenhill, when we completed the unfinished Cabaret Songs for the composer’s 100th birthday in 2013. I was aware of these “love letters”, but I had dismissed them. Auden meant something to me, and his influence on Britten as a gay man was – in my view – significant. He had shaped the composer’s outlook, his politics. But Pears? Starting work, wading through the letters was pretty distancing. I grew up in a small town in Northern Ireland during the 80s – the Troubles. Lawn tennis and Schubert were not a priority. Britten and Pears were end-of-empire public school boys, middle-class monarchists with affected accents and flannels in every drawer. They wore ties. They bowed. They were pre-Aids, pre-Stonewall, pre-legalisation (pre-Dana International, pre-DUP!). There was no connection. I wear my queerness openly. I do not wear ties. I am, in a sense, a reaction against the Britten/Pears generation. But then it is not illegal for me to love a man. There is no threat of imprisonment if a love letter I write is intercepted. So how come these two men, so buttoned up and alien to empowered, liberated me, felt they could write passionate love letters to each other in a pre-Wolfenden world, knowing that each word could be used against them in court? How come I’m still not brave enough, in 2022, to hold another man’s hand in public in Belfast? Both Britten and Pears were, of course, in a rarified world. They had posh friends, they knew politicians and royals. They were more protected than the average bloke in a public lavatory in Liverpool. But others in their world, John Gielgud and Lord Montagu to name but two, had not been so lucky. There was risk. But there is little to no mention of this in the letters. One brief warning in November 1948 asks Britten to seal the envelopes more throughly (“the last one flew the Atlantic wide open!”) but it is a rare allusion to the danger; especially bizarre considering both men were highly visible conscientious objectors! Did they feel protected? Was this naivety? Bravery? Or just passionate, unstoppable love? Suffolk is part of the composer’s myth. The sea, the boats, blah, blah, Grimes, blah. Visits to Aldeburgh are accompanied by coo-ing colleagues, “Don’t you love the sound of the sea?” Yes; but as a gay man I’m screaming, “what were those two fairies doing out here?” For queers, the city is the place. Not its bloated anonymity, but its safety. Its community, clubs, comrades, lovers – the city catches us when we’re spat out of towns. It dilutes shame to homeopathic levels. It saves us. So why retreat to fishing boats and village fetes? Isn’t that what they’d been trying to escape from? But isn’t that what I did? In 2011, I left London and moved back to the Irish town of my birth, Lurgan, in county Armagh. I retreated. It was a ruthless act of self-harm – amputating my 20s – that I felt powerless over. Why? I guess, in my mind at the time, a future was coming into focus: larger works, opera, my own ensemble, and I needed to protect it. The city became a threat. Unstable. Loud. It lacked rock, roots, people who sounded like me. I wanted an artistic home; a word that, as a Northern Irish queer, I had never fully accepted. I wanted to be from somewhere, and that meant making the music there. So, like a volunteer for the Mars mission, I chose relative isolation as a means of future musical freedom. I built a fortress around myself. But I did it without a Pears. And – let’s be frank - it undid me emotionally. Years of adjusting and booze led to the realisation that I’d caged myself with my mortal enemy: myself! Ben was cleverer than me, emotionally. His letters reveal the same instinct: a need to detach and self-protect. But he knows he can only do this with Pears in tow. He removes them both from the world in order to re-create it. His own musical, safe, queer world. His – and Peter’s. Very different from the public image of the eminent composer. I hear this in his music: the duality of private and public. Ebullient tonality, and distant, fragmenting harmony. The conflict of mask, illusion. Openness and deceit, at the same time. In writing my own music for this cycle, I’ve almost written in two styles, too. The Britten settings are brittle, string-laced and formless – searching. While the Pears letters are piano-based, effervescent songs, full of allusion to Pears’s own repertoire (including the camp goddess, Cole Porter). My own love letters I guess, but to the art of song. And to Pears? I hope so. Britten’s music so often dances around the thought of Peter. His love. The composer’s conflict with his own sexual self (even Pears’s absences from Aldeburgh can be heard in some scores). And his music has seeped into me. No matter how hard I try to stop it pouring on to my own pages, it does. So I’m tempted to say, when I talk about how I set these letters, that Britten has already set them for me. I am a product of his music. An inheritor. My music exists because of his. And his exists because of the world these letters secured. It all comes back to “darling Peter”. So I was wrong when I said there was no connection. There is the music. And the queerness. And the need to self-protect and the instinct to build a fortress around yourself. There is the urgency, the safety of home. The assuredness of writing “I love you” and knowing it is not wrong. We are connected. And isn’t that the queer story? Strength through shared identity? Pride? I read the letters now and the loneliness returns. Perhaps it turns to jealousy. I look at the empty doormat and wish a letter lay there. One from someone like Pears, counting the days until he returns to me. I wonder would my music be better?