Classic Queers?

Repressed passions and refined sensibilities: are LGBs really so hooked on classical music? As the Proms - the world’s largest music festival - strikes up (15th July - 10th Sept), mini maestro Adrian Gillan asks around. PLUS: Top 10 Classic Queers!

From Saint-Saëns near the start to enigmatic Elgar on the famous Last Night, the Proms are spun through and through with actual or arguable LGB interest. But does a composer’s sexuality really influence their music? Do us LGBs really have a special affinity with gay composers? And is there even really a high queer quota in the Albert Hall audience, eying each other up through opera glasses from the circle, or brushing up close in the famous standing area below?

“There is certainly no such thing as gay music,” claims Richard Souper from the London Gay Symphony Orchestra (LGSO) which formed in 1996, which welcomes musicians and audiences who are LGB or LGB-friendly and whose concerts have included works by gay composers including Tchaikovsky, Poulenc, de Falla, Britten, Copland and Barber. “I have attended many artistic, theatrical and cultural events on the grounds that they were ‘gay’, but I don’t think I’ve ever been to a concert just because its composers happened to be so.”

Souper doesn’t even accept that gay composers feature that greatly in the LGSO’s repertoire: “Maybe it did more when we started, but it certainly wasn’t a conscious thing. We’ve only ever done one ‘all-gay’ concert although we are often approached to perform pieces by young gay composers and have done so in venues from Croatia to Brighton.”

Opera has been described as “passion in a corset”, a mixed musical metaphor that some have broadly tried to relate to LGB reality which has often - historically at least - been forcibly lived out under oppression. But Souper contends this metaphor bears more relation to LGB listening than to LGB composing or performing: “I play percussion, and when I’m performing a composer who happens to be gay, his sexuality doesn’t even enter my head - I often doubt it even entered into the composer’s. Many of the greatest were either working to order; or were in some sense transcending their own identities.”

“It’s more likely,” he continues, “that listeners of all persuasions project aspects of their own background and identity onto music - so LGB listeners will project gayness onto music they hear, regardless of the sexuality of the composer. Gays might even empathise with music by a straight composer like Mahler and try to claim in some sense it was ‘gay’! There may be some kind of ‘substitution’ going on, helping fulfil emotional needs that might elude the listener in real life. But that’s as true for straight listeners as for gay ones, and as true of pop as it is of classical music.”

Souper is not even convinced you’ll see particularly large numbers of LGBs in audiences: “You tend to ‘see’ what you set out looking for! And the old cliché about gay people somehow being more sensitive, and sensitive people being more likely to listen to classical music, doesn’t hold either. Otherwise, why do so many gay people have no or little interest in classical music? That’s one of the main reasons the LGSO arose - as a group for the ‘minority within the LGB minority’ who share this interest!”

“Gay people are often desperate to claim anything that’s good as their own,” he climaxes. “And they don’t just do that with music. Equally, it seems to work the other way too - just because something’s gay, it must be good! But I’ve waded through some pretty awful poems in gay anthologies!”

Our sceptical Souper is not even convinced it is important that the sexualities of composers, dead or alive, be more fully known: “I dare say gay composers of the past - who felt compelled to hide their sexuality for a variety of reasons - are still kept in the closet somewhat in current day musical discussions. But then as I say, to a large extent, I don’t believe their orientation is especially relevant to the music they made or how it is performed, despite colouring the way us LGBs may listen to it.”

One last stab at the gay card: Might Proms organisers, in some imaginative way, usefully explore the impact of sexuality on classical music as one of their annual themes? Sighs Souper: “I’m not convinced there’s much mileage in this for the reasons discussed. You might dig up all manner of ‘experts’ to make the case. But I suspect it would only lend weight to clichés and not be very illuminating.”

The London Gay Symphony Orchestra (LGSO) is always on the look out for LGB musicians and their friends: www.lgso.org.uk

The BBC Proms are held at the Royal Albert Hall in London 15th July - 10th September 2011, with all main concerts broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. For details and to book: www.bbc.co.uk/proms

Box-out: All-Time Top Ten Classic Queers

Although they naturally may well not have used the words ‘gay’ or bi’ in their own eras, the following great composers, in chronological order of birth, were either openly or demonstrably gay or bi:

1. Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)
2. Mussorgsky (1839-1881)
3. Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
4. de Falla (1876-1946)
5. Poulenc (1899-1963)
6. Copland (1900-1990)
7. Tippett (1905-1998)
8. Barber (1910-1981)
9. Britten (1913-1976)
10. Bernstein (1918-1990)

Additionally, some biographers have argued - albeit more controversially - for the homosexuality or bisexuality of many other genius composers of the past, including:

1. Corelli (1653-1713) - largely because he was once “kept” by a Cardinal in Rome
2. Handel (1685-1759) - largely on the basis of his seeming lack of interest in women
3. Schubert (1797-1828) - largely on account of his circle of associates and his allegedly “feminine” musicality
4. Elgar (1857-1934) - largely on the strength of an alleged homosexual affair that this arch-Roman Catholic national bastion may or may not have had with the male dedicatee of his famous Nimrod March, one of his aptly-titled Enigma Variations. Frankly: a bit tenuous! Wishful thinking or grain of truth?