If Björling had been born a hundred years earlier, leading composers would surely have seized the opportunity to write for a voice of such rare beauty. In the central decades of the twentieth century, however, beauty of tone was often considered to be irrelevant to the expressive ethos of the age. Benjamin Britten once claimed to “loathe what people normally call a beautiful voice”: it was the much less generously endowed English tenor Peter Pears (born eight months before Björling) who, thanks to his close association with Britten, would leave the greatest mark on mid-century classical music. Yet not all composers of merit were deaf to the potential of the Björling sound. It is probable that Hugo Alfvén, now recognized as one of the finest Swedish composers of the twentieth century, had that voice in mind when he wrote one of his most memorable love songs in 1946. The composer was an unassuming man, but in June 1957 he found the courage to write to the tenor: