Peter Pears: biography
1938-1941
Elizabeth and Beata Mayer with Pears
By March 1938 Pears and Britten needed a pied à terre in London and so decided to share a flat, although Pears was frequently away (at Glyndebourne and elsewhere) and Britten often at the Old Mill in Snape. Towards the end of that year they were considering a move to the USA and in April 1939 followed their friends Wystan Auden and Christopher Isherwood there. The outbreak of war five months later meant that Britten was advised to remain in the States as an ‘ambassador for British music’ and Pears stayed with him, soon after their arrival renewing contact with Elizabeth Mayer, whom he had met on an earlier Atlantic crossing. She welcomed them into her family home for the duration of their stay.
Pears and Britten rehearsing, New York, 1941
That October Britten completed the song cycle for high voice and string orchestra, Les Illuminations, to poems of Arthur Rimbaud. Though it was written for the Swiss soprano, Sophie Wyss, Pears soon gave definitive performances of this work and twice recorded it with Britten conducting, in 1941 and 1966. The seventh song Being Beauteous is one of three given a specific dedication, in this case ‘To P.N.L.P’ (Peter Neville Luard Pears)
In the States Pears managed to subsist on money earned from concert engagements, training a madrigal choir and giving singing lessons to a few pupils while himself still studying, at first with Thérèse Schnabel and then with Clytie Mundy, from whose teaching he derived especial benefit. He also gave recitals with Britten, copied scores and translated texts for him.
1942-1944
Britten, Pears, Elizabeth and Michael Mayer, New York, 1941
Once the USA had entered the war Britten and Pears were able to leave and by 1942 had obtained the necessary papers for their return to England. Both now registered as conscientious objectors, believing that they could better serve the world by music than by fighting. They gave concerts for CEMA (The Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts) many of which were arranged by their friend, Ursula Nettleship, and to aid the work of the Friends’ War Relief Service. In some of these Pears was joined by other artists, particularly his fellow pacifist, the pianist Norman Franklin. Between these concerts he travelled throughout the UK with the Sadler’s Wells Opera Company, singing the roles of Tamino (The Magic Flute) Rodolfo (La Bohème), Alfredo (La Traviata), Count Almaviva (The Barber of Seville), Ferrando (Cosi fan tutte) and Vasek (The Bartered Bride). He also began to be in demand for oratorio, most frequently Handel’s Messiah, but also Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, which he first sang in Bristol on 22 April, 1944, following it in London the next day with the tenor solo in Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde.
Britten, Pears and Elizabeth Mayer
The first major work Britten wrote specifically for Pears’s voice was Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo. Elizabeth Mayer was a gifted linguist, and she worked with Pears to translate these Italian texts for publication in recital programmes. Although completed in 1940 the work was not premiered until September 1942, in London’s Wigmore Hall with the composer accompanying. The HMV recording company was so impressed by this performance that as they left the Hall singer and composer were contracted to record it.
1945-1949
On 22 November 1945 the Wigmore Hall was again the setting for a Britten premiere, The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, a song cycle for tenor and piano, bearing the dedication ‘For Peter’. At the end of May, once again at the Wigmore Hall, excerpts from Britten’s opera Peter Grimes were given to introduce its first complete performance at Sadler’s Wells on 7 June, with Pears in the title role. This was the first operatic part composed for Pears, who next created the Male Chorus in The Rape of Lucretia (Glyndebourne 12 July, 1946) and again the title role in Albert Herring (20 June, 1947), also at Glyndebourne.
Britten, Pears and other founding members of the English Opera Group; John Piper, Eric Crozier and Joan Cross, 1946
By this time it had become clear to both men that the formation of a chamber company of singers and instrumentalists would be more financially viable and would enable the performers to sing and act more consistently together. To this end they founded the English Opera Group to perform Britten’s operas and others which also required small forces, such as Lennox Berkeley’s A Dinner Engagement and Brian Easdale’s The Sleeping Children. It was on the Group’s 1947 tour of Holland and Switzerland that Pears suggested there should be ‘our own modest festival’ in Aldeburgh, the Suffolk seaside town which was by now his and Britten’s home. The first Aldeburgh Festival, in June 1948, featured three performances of Albert Herring in the Jubilee Hall and the first hearing of the cantata Saint Nicolas, with Pears as tenor soloist. The official premiere of this work, written to mark the centenary of his old school, Lancing College, came a month later on 24 July in the College Chapel. In December he sang Saint Nicolas in the continental premiere of the work in Holland, in Dutch.
Pears and Ferrier in Edinburgh, 1947
Two other Britten premieres given by Pears at this time were the first Canticle My Beloved is Mine (Francis Quarles) for tenor and piano, at the Dick Sheppard Memorial Concert, 1 November 1947, and the Spring Symphony with Kathleen Ferrier and Jo Vincent. This setting for soloists, chorus and orchestra of texts by several English poets had its first performance at the Holland Festival on 14 July 1949.
During the 1940s Pears became known as an interpreter of Bach, notably in the Passion music. On Passion Sunday 1943 he sang the tenor arias for the Bach Choir’s annual performance of the St Matthew and in succeeding years moved to the demanding role of Evangelist. From Palm Sunday 1947 for most of the next twenty years he sang the Evangelist at this season in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. By the mid 1950s the Ansbach Bachwoche was claiming him for Cantata solos as well. Many of these performances were broadcast both by the BBC and on the Continent.
Britten, Pears and Copland
Contemporary compositions were also part of Pears’s repertoire. He gave over fifty premieres of works by composers as diverse as Hans Werner Henze, Humphrey Searle, Priaulx Rainier, David Bedford and Lutoslawski and frequently commissioned works to encourage the younger generation of composers. The Britten-Pears duo introduced both Tippett’s song cycles as well as works by Aaron Copland, Arthur Oldham, Gary Schurmann, R. W. Wood and William Wordsworth. These recitals were also famous for the perception and sensitivity given to the songs of Purcell, Schumann and Schubert, although Pears resisted performing Die Winterreise until he was fifty, presumably believing that years of experience were needed fully to convey the awareness of mortality in this music. Virtually every recital concluded with Britten arrangements of folk songs, an aspect of the musical heritage which held a special interest for them.