Friday February 26 2021
The former homes of famous people are referred to, variously, as ‘house museums’ or ‘personality houses’. They are effectively physical ‘biographies’, telling the stories of the well-known former occupant(s) and presenting the physical traces of their habitation to the visiting public. In the case of The Red House in Aldeburgh, Britten and Pears’ final home, […]
Friday February 19 2021
Romanticism dies hard: over two hundred years since the movement spread Sturm und Drang over Europe, it still informs our vision of what a creative artist looks like. Composers, poets and painters are expected to be all flashing eyes, flowing locks and complicated love-life; for them, physical activity is solitary wandering over mountains, brooding over […]
Friday February 12 2021
Close inspection of the bookshelves in The Red House reveals a number of volumes that must have had special resonance for Britten and Pears. These titles come under the category of ‘gay literature,’ though they were part of The Red House library well before that term gained common usage. What is interesting is that, whether […]
Thursday February 4 2021
The archive at The Red House spans all aspects of Britten and Pears’ lives together – from their professional activities, the compositions and performances that made them world famous, to the everyday details of their household here. Every scrap of paper tells a story – and they kept virtually everything. The story of their long relationship, the […]
Wednesday February 21 2018
The theme of this year’s LGBT History Month is ‘Geography: Mapping the World’. As a contribution to this, on the 16 February the Foundation staged a small pop-up exhibition in the archive, exploring the geographies of Britten and Pears’ lives: the home they made for themselves, enmeshing themselves deeply with this part of Suffolk, and the places […]
Thursday July 27 2017
On 27 July 1967 the Sexual Offences Act, partially decriminalising homosexuality, was given Royal Assent. It is a significant date in LGBTQ history given that the journey towards it had been long, bumpy and full of controversy. The Wolfenden Report, published ten years earlier in 1957, had recommended that homosexual acts between men over the […]
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16 April 2021