Classical music doesn't have a particularly radical reputation, but that doesn't mean that LGBTQ+ culture hasn't been thriving for centuries within its ranks.
Take, for example, the passion between Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and the violinist Iosef Kotek, which burned hot and flamed out.
Kotek helped Tchaikovsky write his only violin concerto, but fell out of favour with the composer before he actually got to perform it — although Tchaikovsky's Valse-Scherzo does bear a dedication to Kotek.
While Tchaikovsky might be the best-known classical music figure to have a queer romance, he's not the only one.
As the world celebrates Sydney WorldPride, we pay homage to the great, though often secret, love stories of some of history's most talented queer musos, and the legacies they left behind.
A suffragette romance
Composer Ethel Smyth was one of the big names of Britain's Victorian and Edwardian music scene.
She had a great list of lovers, as well as a seemingly unrequited passion for writer Virginia Woolf, who Ethel pursued while in her 70s. Woolf, who was 25 years younger than Ethel, said it was "like being caught by a giant crab".
But the relationship that would leave a lasting mark was borne from the suffragette movement.
When Smyth joined the movement in the early 1900s – and penned the feminist anthem The March of the Women – she met political activist Emmeline Pankhurst.
According to Smyth's memoirs, she taught Pankhurst how to properly throw a stone through a window.
In 1913, they were arrested and jailed together in HM Prison Holloway, where Smyth was observed conducting a choir of incarcerated suffragettes with her prison-issue toothbrush.
Her memoirs imply their relationship was intimate, describing Pankhurst as a "a more astounding figure than Joan of Arc".
Evidence of their romance is all over Smyth's music.
Desperate not to be seen writing small-scale, "feminine" pieces, she usually opted for big, brash, "muscular" orchestral works.
But after she left the political sphere and watched from afar as Pankhurst suffered incarceration, vilification and hunger strikes, she wrote Possession, a delicately set song about letting love survive by letting it go.
The dedication at the top of the score? "To EP."
'My beloved is mine and I am his'
Composer Benjamin Britten and tenor Peter Pears were partners — musical, professional and personal — for 40 years.
Their relationship likely started on an ocean liner bound for America in 1939, when as avowed pacifists, they both left to avoid the now inevitable war in Europe.
In the following years, Britten wrote reams of music for Pears to sing, and there are countless recordings of them performing together.
They wrote enough letters to fill a book – which doubles as a thorough guide to music industry gossip of the 1930s to the 1970s.
The pair lived together, when touring schedules allowed, in a house on the Suffolk Coast, where the relationship they called a marriage could be something of an open secret.
Their bond also proved beneficial to both their careers.
While Pears' voice was described as "reedy" and mocked by his peers, Britten wrote so beautifully for him that a whole generation of listeners grew to embrace him.
Pears is now remembered as one of the great British tenors.
Their on-stage repertoire included a song Britten wrote for Pears in 1947, "Canticle I: My beloved is mine and I am his".
Britten gets away with what sounds like explicit queerness to modern ears by putting the words of the Bible, The Song of Songs, in Pears' mouth: "That I my best-beloved's am; that he is mine".
They remained devoted to each other for decades.
In one of the last letters of his life, Britten writes to Pears:
"I do love you so terribly and not only glorious you, but your singing …
"What have I done to deserve such an artist and man to write for?"
Pears replied, "You say things which turn my heart over with love and pride … But you know love is blind, and what you do not see is that it is you who have given me everything.
"I am here as your mouthpiece and I live in your music."
Britten and Pears are buried side by side in Aldeburgh, the town where they made a home together.
An avant-garde affair
In 1944, composer John Cage scored dancer Merce Cunningham's first solo concert.
They were likely already lovers, which they remained until Cage's death in 1992.
For both artists, the spark of mutual creativity was vital to their partnership – and their creative collaborations were radical.
Together, they pioneered an avant-garde approach called indeterminacy, creating work that was different every time based on the roll of dice or flip of a coin.
They lived quietly, their relationship illegal for much of its length.
While channelling their energies into their art, they sent each other letters full of longing.
Cage wrote to Cunningham in 1944: "I would like to measure my breath in relation to the air between us".
Their collaborations continued, with Cage saying in a 1981 interview that their partnership had reached such a point of mutual understanding that it was "like the weather" because it was "impossible to say when something begins or ends".
They never spoke publicly about their personal relationship in any detail.
Living love out loud
Queer love stories have — necessarily — happened at very different volumes.
Cage and Cunningham had a lifelong but almost silent love story, not obvious in their music but subtly visible in everything they achieved.
But by the 1970s, a younger generation of queer composers was becoming more explicit about their identities in and around their music: living their love lives out loud.
That's where Julius Eastman enters Cage and Cunningham's story.
Eastman, who was Black, gay, and 30 years younger than Cage, had very different ideas of the avant-garde.
At a 1975 performance in Buffalo, New York, he took to the stage to perform an extended musical work by Cage, who was in the audience.
To Cage's horror, Eastman used the performance to strip a man, who was probably his boyfriend, declaring him "a very rare and wonderful specimen".
In a lecture the next day, Cage accused Eastman of using his sexuality as a creative crutch "because he has no other idea to express".
The two men had led such different lives to this point that no fraternity could be found.
It's been observed by those commenting on the Buffalo performance, and the music scene of the time, that Eastman was the kind of artist that neither Cage nor Cunningham would ever have become.
Nor could they be, growing up and falling in love before the sexual revolution and the civil rights era in the USA.
When asked about Cage's reaction to his performance, Eastman said, "What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest. Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest."
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