English composer Michael Tippett was BOTD in 1905. Born in London and raised in Suffolk, he attended boarding school in Edinburgh where he had a relationship with a male student. Determined to become a composer, he studied at the Royal College of Music, supporting himself as a teacher. During the 1930s, he became friends with gay writers W. H. Auden and David Ayerst, who introduced him to his first partner, the artist Wilfred Franks. After a course of psychoanalysis, Tippett finally accepted his homosexuality, pursuing sex and music composition with equal vigour. A conscientious objector during World War Two, he was briefly imprisoned for failing to comply with non-combatant duties. His musical reputation grew after the 1944 premiere of A Child of Our Time, an oratorio on pacifist themes blending Wilfred Owen’s anti-war poetry, the anti-Jewish attacks of Kristallnacht and African-American spirituals. His 1953 orchestral piece Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli became one of his most popular pieces. He is best known for his 1965 opera The Midsummer Marriage, a pastorale referencing Mozart’s The Magic Flute, T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land and Jungian theory. Tippett became one of the leading British composers of his generation, frequently compared to his friend and occasional collaborator (and fellow homosexual) Benjamin Britten. Tippett had a number of relationships with men, sometimes simultaneously; he lived with his long-term partner, the artist Karl Hawker, for nearly 30 years. He continued composing and attending performances of his work into his 80s. He died in 1998 aged 93.