Born on the feast day of St. Cecilia and nearly killed by pneumonia at three months old, Benjamin Britten grew from a fragile child in Lowestoft into the first composer ever elevated to the British House of Lords. This episode follows a dedicated pacifist during total war and a gay man living under laws that criminalized his existence as he reshaped his nation’s musical culture from the outside.

We trace his father’s gramophone ban, the brutal prep school that forged his pacifism, his mentorship under Frank Bridge, and the Royal College of Music faculty that blocked him from studying with Alban Berg. We explore W.H. Auden’s liberating influence, his lifelong partnership with tenor Peter Pears, their wartime exile in North America, the U-boat-dodging return to England, and the seismic 1945 premiere of Peter Grimes. We also confront the darkness that followed his visit to the Belsen concentration camp, the police investigation into his private life, the friends he discarded as corpses, and the War Requiem written for Coventry Cathedral.

• How Balinese gamelan heard through Colin McPhee expanded Britten’s sonic palette
• The conscientious objector tribunal that granted him and Pears unconditional exemption
• Building the English Opera Group, the Aldeburgh Festival, and Snape Maltings as his own kingdom
• The intercutting of the Latin mass with Wilfred Owen’s poetry in the War Requiem
• Death in Venice, the 1973 heart surgery that paralyzed his right hand, and his peerage months before death