Maintaining contact through their letters was of vital importance to Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears throughout their 39-year relationship. Towards the end of his life, on 17 November 1974 (Letter 349), Britten wrote a letter from Aldeburgh to Pears who had recently made his Metropolitan Opera House debut in Death in Venice:

Britten's appeal ‘how long, how long’ echoes the concluding cry in ‘Before Life and After’, from the song cycle of Thomas Hardy poems Winter Words, a work that he and Pears first performed together in October 1953 and which had become an established part of their recital programme. The phrase conveys a longing for the return of a mythical past, an ancient world that came before the corrupt one, an impression that Pears described as Hardy's ‘most personal and consistent view of the universe’. Removed from this context, it offered Britten a more intimate meaning and he employed Hardy's words to put across his more immediate longing – 20 December was the final New York performance of Death in Venice after which Pears would return home.

Britten's valedictory question was a familiar way for him to end a letter to Pears. A plea for his partner's swift return had become a frequent closing sentiment in his correspondence during their periods of absence from one another. What was different in this case, though, was Britten's awareness of the grave state of his health.

Although the war officially ended in Europe in 1945 on 8 May, its effects nonetheless persisted. The Allied victory brought rejoicing and an end to the nightly blackouts, the constant whine of sirens and the threat of air raids, but the return to ‘normal’ life was tempered by the scale of devastation and a profound sense of loss. Britten and Pears were among the fortunate, having come through the war unharmed. Moreover, they were able to carry on with their music-making. Britten had time to compose, largely uninterrupted, giving him the space needed to work on Peter Grimes.

He completed the opera, still under the shadow of war, in February 1945. Rehearsals began almost immediately and despite some tensions that arose around the work's suitability for the reopening of Sadler's Wells, there was in the press a sense of excitement about the prospect of an English opera by an English composer. Grimes was premiered on 7 June and propelled Britten and Pears to new heights, solidifying their reputations both at home and abroad. In July 1945 the composer embarked on a tour with violinist Yehudi Menuhin to play for the survivors at Bergen-Belsen and other German concentration camps. Upon witnessing the most appalling consequences of the war, he acknowledged his and Pears's good fortune, mixed with a sense of guilt and disbelief: ‘I don't know why we should be so lucky, in all this misery’ (Letter 72).

Ultimately, their efforts to produce Grimes and the operas that followed led to the founding of their own opera company in December 1946, the English Opera Group (EOG) and the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts (1948), in which their musical partnership was a central focus. The Festival was Pears's idea, the fruit of discussions following a financially disastrous July 1947 tour by the EOG to Holland and Switzerland, in which the group lost around £3,000. In response, Pears brought up the idea of a homegrown festival: ‘Why not make our own festival? A modest Festival with a few concerts given by friends? Why not have an Aldeburgh Festival?’1 The questions were timely, for the EOG was in need of a home base.

All artists share a longing for what Yeats called ‘the heart and the hearth’… the desire to be home, but blessed and cursed by the need to communicate with the world. These letters show how two huge artists who were so often parted, survived. There is no question of either of them changing their natures, one an extrovert performer, the other a quiet composer – scruffed necks pulled apart by their gifts which were their attraction – and both paying the price, dealing with the necessity of long parting with an unrestrained frankness that allowed them to be together, intimately creating a hermetically sealed world.

To read these letters is to climb up a wall and peer into the secret garden of two giants. You expect to hear the roar of their success and achievements but instead you read the timpani sound of their affections. It is the terms of endearments, the ‘Honey buns’, the ‘My darlings’, that remind us we have encroached on their lives. Many of the letters have our text message modernity and brevity. Some are like email as they send short hand requests for times of trains, whinging about touring and the disorientation of endless hotels, asking for scores to be found on top of cupboards, passing love from mutual friends. The quarrels too are immediately recognisable, reprimands for mistimed calls and bad moods, the vibrant, intense need to make up, and heart-stopping, delightful, random declarations.

It is astonishing that these men created a totally realised domestic relationship that has remarkable contemporary immediacy during a period when it was illegal to love someone of your own sex. To me their lives seem an act of huge integrity. It shocks us into admiring the clarity of their affections. Here we see the secret, brave counterbalance in this fulcrum of daily love as it beams light into the seam of desolate ostracisation that runs through Ben's work.

Letters are fragments. The act of parting and re-meeting which of course we never read would hold a different vocabulary. This throws up the interesting hunt in the mystery of creative invention.

In my experience of creative enterprise and relationships, new work is the art of pushing each other's abilities. Practical experiments occur in the rehearsal room, the piano room for Britten.

‘He's one of the nicest people I know, but frightfully reticent,’ Britten wrote in his diary after a night of playing and singing his songs with Pears in October 1937. Already acquainted, they got to know each other properly following the death in April of mutual friend Peter Burra, who had been killed in a plane crash. On 6 May they had travelled together to Burra's cottage in Berkshire to help sort through some of his possessions. Although they were each involved with their own social circles at this point, they gradually built a friendship through shared interests: going to concerts and films, dinner and weekend parties, playing tennis and impromptu late-night song recitals. Their earliest letters show that music was central to the growing connection between them. In August 1937 Pears reports on the first concert performance at Salzburg of the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, which Britten had completed the previous month. He offers his impression of the Boyd Neel Orchestra's interpretation and suggests how the performance might be strengthened. These first letters also demonstrate how each encourages the other in their respective professions, with Pears reassuring Britten that his work is the best in the programme and Britten promising to compose more songs for Pears to sing.

In March 1938 they rented a flat together in London at 43 Nevern Square, SW5, after the marriage in January of Britten's sister Beth, with whom he had shared lodgings since the early 1930s. Britten was now also the owner of the Old Mill, in Snape, near the Suffolk coast, which from April he shared with fellow composer Lennox Berkeley. Although he and Pears had clearly become close and enjoyed one another's company, their lives remained separate, as did their careers. Between late 1937 and March 1939, Britten supported himself by composing incidental music for the BBC and for the stage. He worked for the Group Theatre who produced plays by young, left-leaning writers like W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, with whom Britten found much common ground, personally and politically.

The freighter MS Axel Johnson reached the port of Liverpool on 17 April 1942. Its five-week journey across the Atlantic had, for its passengers Pears and Britten, been a frightening and uncomfortable experience. The ship had made its way by crawling up the coast of New England to Halifax, Nova Scotia, before a perilous twelve-day crossing of an ocean filled with submarines. Somewhere along the way, one of the vessel's funnels caught fire, apparently causing their protective escort to move on and leave the Axel Johnson to complete its voyage alone and unguarded, but fortunately without further incident. To make matters worse, the company on board the ship was, in Pears's estimation, ‘rather desolate’.1 He was unable to sing during the journey, but Britten, despite competition from people whistling in the corridors, and the ship's refrigeration unit right next to their cabin, was actually quite productive. His music manuscripts had been confiscated at the customs screening in New York, so on board he finished the Hymn to St Cecilia (text by Auden) and wrote out the portions of his Clarinet Concerto that he had completed prior to the voyage (eventually left unfinished). During the ocean crossing, Britten also composed A Ceremony of Carols for treble chorus and harp, inspired by finding a book of early English poems during the stopover in Halifax.

Upon disembarking at Liverpool, the two made their way to London together, but until they could find a flat to share they now had to separate. Pears made his home base with his parents in Barnes while Britten stayed with his sister Barbara in Chelsea. By September they found lodging with Ursula Nettleship at 104A Cheyne Walk, a situation less than ideal for privacy, so five months later they moved to a maisonette in St John's Wood High Street, keeping this as their London base. They would later share this with Britten's publisher Erwin Stein, his wife Sophie and daughter Marion. In December 1943, Britten returned to his pre-war composition retreat, the Old Mill in Snape, Suffolk, joining his sister Beth and her family (husband Kit Welford and children Sebastian and Sally). There, despite the sound of military aircraft (the ‘bloody, bloody’ aeroplanes – see Letter 48) he was able to complete Peter Grimes.

The early 1950s found Pears and Britten both flourishing with success, bolstered by an increase in commissions for new works from Britten and demand for Pears as a soloist, both in the UK and abroad. In addition to the hard work of composing and performing, they continued to oversee the English Opera Group, which experienced numerous financial and administrative difficulties, and to develop and expand the Aldeburgh Festival in keeping with their own standards and philosophical outlook. However, there came expectations of even greater achievement from audiences, critics, fellow musicians and, most significantly, from themselves.

By this time, Pears was in demand as both a concert artist and on the operatic stage, but with increasing pressures to perform he began to suffer from throat problems. Not surprisingly, he felt insecure about being unable to sing at his best before an audience. Thus, Britten's letters during this period are filled with reassurance; for example, after listening to a broadcast of Bach's St Matthew Passion, he writes ‘The voice sounds so full & so rich, & with so much variety, & this glorious musical phrasing […] There can never have been an Evangelist like you – it's wonderful to be born in your lifetime to hear you do it’ (Letter 158). With the weight of such high standards, it is no wonder that both men became so critical of their individual abilities and relied upon their appraisal of one another to ease their doubts. Britten acknowledges this in a letter of March 1951: ‘It was lovely to play [Billy Budd] to you, & you gave me back my confidence which had been slowly ebbing away. In a work of this size & tension that is one of one's greatest problems. I believe that is yours too – if one aims high (& you achieve your aims so often) one is so desparately ashamed when one knows one is missing them’ (Letter 157).

In truth, both men were working themselves to the point of exhaustion. Britten's physical ailments, coupled with the time constraints from working on two complex and significant operas – Billy Budd for the 1951 Festival of Britain and Gloriana, composed in honour of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953 – resulted in his being unable to give recitals with Pears as frequently as in the past.

In these final months of Britten's life, Pears continued to pursue his successful international career, performing and teaching. As well as the imperative to continue singing, an important motivation for his frequent overseas trips was fundraising and recruiting new students for the Britten–Pears School1 they were working together to establish at Snape Maltings. The School was, in a real sense, their child, and would occupy Pears professionally for the remainder of his life.

In June the composer was made a life peer in the Queen's Birthday Honours list, becoming Baron Britten of Aldeburgh. Britten was reluctant, and disclosed to Rosamund Strode that he accepted the honour because ‘he felt it was marvellous for music’. There is a hint at Britten's discomfort over the peerage in Letter 355 from Pears, who feels the need to underline that he is ‘proud and touched but in no way resentful or jealous’ – the acceptance cannot have been a straightforward decision, given their shared left-wing principles, and Britten would certainly not have taken the decision alone.

Now mostly wheelchair-bound and wholly reliant on Rita Thomson, Britten was too frail to write himself, but in these final letters (356–65), Pears sends home a set of vivid and entertaining descriptions of his time in Los Angeles while giving masterclasses at the University of Southern California. Similar to the narrative diaries he kept on earlier trips, they relay impressions of people and places, effectively sharing his experiences with Britten. Unsurprisingly, both the intimacy and the rushed urgency of the correspondence from earlier years is gone, but the selfdeprecating warmth and occasionally trivial, anecdotal tone persists. Pears worried the letters were ‘silly’, but Thomson writes to assure him that they are of great comfort: ‘Your letters 2 and 4 arrived first but today 1 & 3 came so Ben had a lovely time reading the four of them. He reads me the amusing bits like when the handle came off the Gin carton!! They do cheer him up immensely and makes you feel so much nearer.’

Pears journeyed on to Toronto from Los Angeles to perform and raise money for the Britten–Pears School and the Aldeburgh Festival.

Britten's relentless schedule of writing and performing began to take its toll on his health. Towards the end of 1953 he received confirmation that an aching, burning sensation in his right shoulder that had plagued him for several months was bursitis. The ailment, he wrote to E.M. Forster, prompted his doctors to forbid him using the arm, which brought a temporary halt to performance and composition. Work on the new chamber opera, The Turn of the Screw, was delayed until 30 March 1954, leaving him little more than five months to complete it in time for the premiere in Venice, scheduled for the following September.

There is a pause in the correspondence when Britten and Pears embark together on a lengthy international tour towards the end of 1955. Beginning in Holland, they travelled across the continent to Istanbul, then flew to India and on to Malaysia, Indonesia, China and Japan. The trip included concert engagements in Europe in October and November, and Japan (one of which was recorded by NHK Television, their television debut) in February 1956. Although the trip was intended partly as a holiday, an enforced rest for Britten, the unfamiliar, exotic cultures he experienced proved to be a rich source of inspiration for him. Both musicians were captivated by traditional Japanese theatre, especially the Noh drama Sumidagawa that eventually became a model for Curlew River, the first of the three Church Parables. The most immediate legacy, however, arose from a visit to Bali, where Britten's experience of the gamelan led him to incorporate its percussive sounds and rich, alien sonorities into his latest project, the ballet The Prince of the Pagodas. With a scenario and choreography by John Cranko, the work was finally premiered at the Royal Opera House on New Year's Day, 1957. Later that year the singing of East Anglian schoolchildren inspired him to adapt the medieval Chester Miracle Play for a new type of opera, Noye's Fludde. Composed primarily as a work for community performance, it was premiered at the 1958 Aldeburgh Festival by a combination of schoolchildren and professional musicians. Britten was also inspired by the artistry of fellow musicians, for example in 1954 he composed Canticle III: Still Falls the Rain, for himself and Pears to perform with virtuoso horn player Dennis Brain, to verses by Edith Sitwell.

The correspondence in this chapter continues to chart Pears's career as a recitalist on the continent and in the US, as well as his final appearance at Ansbach in 1964. But it also takes account of the personal and artistic connections Britten was forging with other musicians. On 21 September 1960, the composer attended the British premiere of Shostakovich's Cello Concerto no. 1 at the Festival Hall and established what would become a life-long friendship with the soloist, Mstislav Rostropovich. At Rostropovich's request Britten composed the Sonata in C major for cello and piano for them to perform together. It received an enthusiastic reception at its first performance in the Jubilee Hall in Aldeburgh in July 1961. The Symphony for Cello and Orchestra followed in 1963 and the three suites for solo cello in 1964, 1967 and 1971; all demonstrated Britten's complete awareness of Rostropovich's exceptional musicianship, and were gifts that functioned as ‘lifebelts’, as the cellist described them. Rostropovich and his wife, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, were frequent guests at The Red House and they accompanied and hosted Britten and Pears's visits to Russia; their enduring relationship remaining unaffected by the surrounding tensions of the Cold War. Music drew them together, but perhaps it was because the Rostropoviches also felt themselves to be outsiders, eventually defecting from the Soviet Union in 1974, that they became so close. Britten had kept Vishnevskaya's voice in mind as he wrote the solo soprano part of his War Requiem, which he began composing in April 1961. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, for whom Britten composed the baritone part, also joined the select list of artists to whom Britten dedicated works, premiering the Songs and Proverbs of William Blake in June 1965. The composer admitted to Pears the difficulty he experienced in writing for other singers (see Letter 290), although Pears had his own connection with the piece, having made the selection of texts to be set from Blake's work. Julian Bream, by now well established as an alternative recital partner for Pears, was also the recipient of a work written for and dedicated to him. Nocturnal, after John Dowland (1964) was based on Dowland's song Come, Heavy Sleep, from the repertoire in which Bream specialised.