Britten and Pears had astonishingly hectic professional lives. Outside of Britten’s composing commitments and Pears’s singing career, they had a busy schedule of touring together as a recital duo, premiering operas, and putting on the annual Aldeburgh Festival. Their closest companions formed an enduring core over the years that was of great personal importance to both men. They had their own individual friends, but their most regular holiday companions and, at times, housemates were friends of them both. For the most part, it is striking that many of these friends were heterosexual couples and ‘conventional’ family units, although their circle did embrace gay friends Colin Graham, William Plomer, and Basil Coleman. The couples they both worked and holidayed with included John and Myfanwy Piper, Erwin and Sofie Stein – parents of Marion Stein, later Lady Harewood – and the flamboyant Russian couple Mstislav Rostropovich and Galina Vishnevskaya. This chapter introduces these close companions, among many others, and the extent to which they provided a nurturing and creatively stimulating circle of friends to Britten and Pears.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s apartment in St Petersburg, at 28 Zagorodny Prospekt, was famous for its hospitality. Twice a month, at fortnightly intervals, the composer’s family hosted musical evenings known as ‘Korsakov’s Wednesdays’. Here would gather friends and colleagues representing every aspect of the city’s vibrant artistic community: music, theatre, literature and art. Regular visitors included the composer Alexander Glazunov, the concert pianist and conductor Felix Blumenfeld, Vasily Yastrebtsev (Rimsky-Korsakov’s first biographer)1 and the art and music critic Vladimir Stasov (who first applied the term Moguchaya kuchka to ‘The Mighty Handful’), the painter Mikhail Vrubel’ and his wife, coloratura soprano Nadezhda Zabela-Vrubel’ as well as the legendary bass Fyodor Chaliapin; both of these singers regularly performed at the Maryinsky Theatre in productions of Rimsky-Korsakov’s operas.