English composer Roger Quilter was BOTD in 1877. Born in Hove, Sussex to an aristocratic family, the son of a baronet, he was educated at Eton College. He studied music composition at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, where he befriended fellow students Percy Grainger and Cyril Scott, becoming known as the Frankfurt Group. Quilter is best known for his art songs and light music for orchestras, including his Children’s Overture, the musical suite for the play Where the Rainbow Ends and a song suite based on the poetry of William Shakespeare. His 1936 opera Julia was a critical and commercial disaster, closing after only seven performances. Unhappily gay and closeted for most of his life, he is thought to have had a brief affair with Robert Allerton, an American composer who hosted an artists’ colony at his home in Italy, dedicating the composition I Arise From Dreams of Thee to him later in life. The pressures of hiding his homosexuality and the death of his nephew Arnold Guy Vivian during World War One led to his suffering a nervous breakdown, and he struggled with mental illness for the last twenty years of his life. He died in 1953, aged 75.