“You couldn’t just walk into The Jubilee,” recalled Barbara Hoke, an Oakland resident whose social life was centered at the bar for years. The Baroque composer and violinist is known for his chamber sonatas and concerti grossi, and has gone down in history for refusing to play a section of Handel’s oratorio, The Triumph Of Time And Truth, because a violin note went higher than Corelli believed appropriate for the instrument.Owned by Betty Arnesen and Velma Souza, The Jubilee was a working-class, no-nonsense establishment where women came to play pool and knock back a few. And like them, he was associated with gay clergyman, Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni. Lully died relatively young, succumbing to a fatal infection in a wound on his foot, inflicted by his own conducting stick.Ĭorelli was a contemporary of both Lully and Handel (see above), moving in the same sexually-fluid circles as them. The operatic composer and violinist Jean-Baptiste Lully worked in the court of King Louis XIV and was an ambitious figure in court and operatic music, dominating French opera in the 17th century.Īs well as being known for rising up influential ranks impressively quickly, Lully is thought to have had quite the colourful private life, embarking on affairs with both men and women – to the extent it got him in hot water with the King. Music scholars continue to debate whether or not the diverse range of styles in his music serve as an outward representation of an inner moral conflict in Poulenc. His compositions spanned from intimate chamber sonatas with sublime, twisting melodies and delicate impressionist harmonies (think the 1957 Flute Sonata), to his Piano Concerto and epic one-act opera for soprano and orchestra, La voix humaine.
Woolf described it as “like being caught by a giant crab”, for better or worse.Īs well as being one of the first openly gay composers full stop, Poulenc also didn’t eschew his sexuality in the context of his religious faith. Her 1911 song, ‘The March of the Women’, which had lyrics by Cicely Hamilton, was dedicated to movement leader Emmeline Pankhurst – documented to have been a lover of Smyth’s – and became the official anthem of the Women’s Social and Political Union and women’s suffrage activism around the world.Īt the age of 71 Smyth, by all accounts, met and fell in love with Virginia Woolf (who would have been in her 40s at the time). Her best-known works are the opera The Wreckers and her Mass in D.
His ground-breaking operas, which include Peter Grimes (1945), and The Turn of the Screw (1954) – and his famous War Requiem – tackle contemporaneous issues around psychology and post-war trauma, as well his own homosexuality, which was illegal in Britten’s lifetime.īritten founded the Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk with Pears and librettist Eric Crozier.Įthel Smyth was a prolific composer and an active member of the women’s suffrage movement, and she made no secret of her relationships with women.īorn in South-East London, Smyth studied at the Leipzig Conservatory and there met composers that included Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Clara Schumann and Brahms. He studied under Frank Bridge, John Ireland and Arthur Benjamin among others, and was also a fine pianist. Read more: 9 Black composers who changed the course of classical music historyĮdward Benjamin Britten is one of the finest composers of English operas, choral works, and songs, many of which he wrote for his life partner, tenor Sir Peter Pears.īritten started writing music as young as nine, when he wrote an oratorio.