Cellist David Finckel with his wife, pianist Wu Han (Photo: Alex Irvin)
A lot can happen when two great artists get together, whether they’re creative partners, life partners, or both.
Many are the love stories enshrined in classical music; many works of art have persevered long after relationships ran their course. For a lucky few throughout history, however, a chance encounter with another artist led to the formation of a powerful love story, one whose bond was only strengthened through music. These are what we like to call “musical power couples.”
Here are just a few examples of some musical power couples that can be found throughout classical music history.
Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti
Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti’s relationship began, quite simply, out of necessity. When Menotti arrived as a student at the Curtis Institute of Music in 1928, he only knew Italian and French — no English! Luckily for him, there was a student one year his senior who also spoke French. Their initial camaraderie blossomed into a relationship that lasted a lifetime.
The couple collaborated on two operas together - Vanessa (1957) and A Hand of Bridge (1953). Both operas were successful. Though it hasn’t been staged often, Vanessa received a glowing premiere at the Met in 1958, and A Hand of Bridge continues to be a commonly performed micro-opera. The latter is a contender for one of the shortest operas to ever be produced, running a total length of just nine minutes. In both works, Menotti wrote the libretto and Barber wrote the music.
Their relationship formally ended in 1970 and Menotti moved to Europe in 1973. Yet despite this distance, the two remained close friends until Barber’s death in 1981. In fact, it was Menotti who was at Barber’s bedside when he passed.
Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears
The relationship between Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears is one of the great musical love stories of the 20th century. Pears and Britten met through a mutual friend in 1937: Pears an operatic tenor and Britten a rising composer. It was a match made in musical heaven and one that lasted until Britten’s passing in 1976.
The two often performed together, traveling internationally to give recitals of piano and vocal duets. Britten wrote many of his vocal pieces with Peter in mind. One of the most famous of these is perhaps his Canticle I. My Beloved in Mine. They moved in together and supported each other through various musical endeavors.
It’s no wonder that the two men never spoke publicly about their relationship; homosexuality in Great Britain was criminalized until the 1967 Sexual Offenses Act, which still only partially decriminalized gay relationships. Yet both wanted to make sure their love would be remembered. Before Benjamin Britten passed, he asked his biographer Donald Mitchell to “tell the truth about Peter and me.”
Peter Pears went public about their relationship a few years after Britten passed. The two men left behind an archive of material documenting their lives together at their final home together, the Red House in Aldeburgh. Click the video below to see Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears perform and discuss the Schubert cycle Die Winterreise in a rare recording!
Paule Maurice and Pierre Lantier
Our next duo helped elevate the saxophone to new heights as a classical music instrument! It is not certain when the two got married, but it is evident that Paule Maurice and Pierre Lantier met through their mutual work at L'École Normale de Musique. Both educators and composers, the French couple added some much-needed contributions to the world of classical saxophone music, many of which are still performed to this day.
Maurice and Lantier did work together in an academic sense, publishing a treatise on harmony together called Complément du traité harmonie de Reber. But the couple never co-wrote anything together musically. That being said, they were often each other’s greatest supporters. Lantier even directed the premiere of one of Maurice’s most famous pieces, Tableaux de Provence, in 1958.
Here are two of the couple’s best known pieces for saxophone: the Sicilienne for alto saxophone and piano by Pierre Lantier, and the Tableaux de Provence by Paule Maurice.
Galina Vishnevskaya and Mstislav Rostropovich
These two Russian musicians started their musical careers under the Stalin regime. Vishnevskaya got noticed while she was singing for the troops as a young girl, landing her a role at the Leningrad District Operetta Theatre, then later the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. In the meantime, Rostropovich studied cello with Dmitri Shostakovich, won the All-Union Competition in December 1945, and began to debut in the West.
Opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich with their daughters at home, ca. 1959.
The couple met when Rostropovich was helping conduct a festival at the Bolshoi Theater. It was love at first sight; they married only four days after they first met! Both Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich had strong personalities, resulting in spells of turbulence throughout their marriage, yet the partnership worked nonetheless. They stayed married for 52 years, had two children together, and created a series of wonderful recordings. Composers, including Britten and Penderecki, wrote pieces for each artist. One of their arguably most famous recordings as a couple was Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.
Other than a love of music, the couple also had a shared love for charity and activism. They performed many concerts for charitable organizations and publicly supported artists like Dmitri Shostakovich and Alexander Solzhenitsyn when they came under fire from the Communist regime. Later in life, the couple also set up two charities together: the Vishnevskaya – Rostropovich Foundation to provide medical care for sick children in Russia, and The Vishnevskaya Opera Centre to help train young singers.
Joan Sutherland & Richard Bonynge
Sutherland and Bonynge met at the Royal College of Music in London in 1950. She was there to audition for the Opera school; he was already a piano student. The two Australians hit it off very quickly and were soon studying opera roles together. Bonynge would help Sutherland when practicing for her roles and accompany her throughout her early career. As her career progressed, so did his: Sutherland was invited to become a member of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in 1952, but the performance that really catapulted her to international attention was the title role of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor in 1957. Bonynge’s first conducting job occurred in 1962 in Rome, launching his career as a highly sought after opera conductor.
Bonynge and Sutherland were married in 1954 and welcomed a son in 1956. The couple were synonymous with 20th century opera royalty. Sutherland is one of the most prolific coloratura sopranos of the 20th century, boasting 40 complete opera recordings in addition to the myriad of solo and recital recordings in her discography, not to mention several honorary degrees and many television appearances. Bonynge has over 50 recorded operas under his belt, as well as an extensive collection of guest appearances as a collaborative pianist. Together as a couple, they helped to usher in the resurgence of bel canto repertoire that occurred between the 1950s and 1970s.
After Sutherland’s death in 2010, Bonynge went on to form the Joan Sutherland & Richard Bonynge Foundation in her memory. The organization helps advocate for young opera singers, including giving scholarships and finding them performance opportunities.
Claude Frank and Lilian Kallir
Coincidence or fate? These two European immigrants first saw each other in Lisbon while making their way to the United States, but it would be many years before they made their first formal acquaintance! Claude Frank was a German-born pianist who escaped with his family to the United States in 1940; in the same year, Czech-born pianist Lilian Kallir made her way to New York with her family in order for her to pursue private lessons and piano competitions.
Pianists Claude Frank, Wu Han, Lilian Kallir, Seymour Lipkin (Photo: Lincoln Center)
Frank and Kallir met at Tanglewood as students in 1947 where they bonded over a mutual dislike of Prokofiev’s music. The couple married in Marlboro, Vermont, in 1959 and had a daughter, Pamela Frank, who would later join both her parents in performances as a violinist. Claude and Pamela even recorded the complete Beethoven sonatas for violin and piano as a father-daughter duo!
Both Frank and Kallir were internationally recognized pianists in high demand. Lillian Kallir debuted with the New York Philharmonic at 17 years old, and her recording of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17 was nominated for a Grammy. Claude Frank was on the music faculty at Yale, and also made his New York Philharmonic debut with Leonard Bernstein. As such, chances to perform together weren’t too common. However, they did make an exception for one of their favorite composers: Mozart.
Mozart’s works for piano four hands made up a cornerstone of their repertoire. Unfortunately their duets were never caught in a studio recording, but the married couple often performed the works at some of their favorite festivals, including the Marlboro Music Festival. Hear a snippet of their performance from the Marlboro Archive here.
Marin Alsop and Kristin Jurkscheit
Marin Alsop (Photo: Theresa Wey)
Marin Alsop and Kristin Jurkscheit met at the Tanglewood Music Festival in 1988. It was Alsop’s first time at Tanglewood as a guest conductor; Jurkscheidt was a horn player with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra. Since their initial meeting, Jurkscheit and Alsop played in several orchestras together. While Alsop was conducting with her various orchestras, Jurkscheidt was busy with orchestral work and teaching at the University of Maryland Baltimore. After decades of being together, they decided to tie the knot in 2020. They share a son, Auden.
Jurkscheit is no longer a professional horn player but still leads a life steeped in music; one of her many projects is directing the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship program for rising women conductors.
Wu Han and David Finckel
David Finckel and Wu Han (Photo: Lilian Finckel)
Cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han are one of the 21st century’s most active musical couples, sharing achievements as performers, arts administrators, recording artists, and educators.
The dynamic duo first met through a competition. The legendary Emerson String Quartet — which David Finckel had recently joined — was ensemble-in-residence at the Hartt School of Music. They were looking for a pianist to play Robert Schumann's Piano Quintet in E flat major, and hosted a competition to choose their performer. Student and Taiwanese piano star Wu Han was the winner. Finckel and Wu Han had an instant musical connection. They married in 1985 and have been playing together in various capacities ever since.
In 2004, the married couple decided to take their love of chamber music to the next level by accepting roles as co-Artistic Directors of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. As part of their crusade for chamber music, Finckel and Han have also co-founded Music@Menlo festival, a chamber music festival and organization located in Silicon Valley. As if that wasn’t enough, Han and Finckel were one of the first classical musicians to venture into the world of internet-based recordings when they formed the artist-run label: ArtistLed.
The duo is perhaps most famous for their interpretations of the Beethoven cello sonatas, having recorded all five of them.
Rafael Payare and Alisa Weilerstein
Conductor Rafael Payare and cellist Alisa Weilerstein try to perform together whenever they can, despite busy schedules that take them both all over the world. They met in 2009 during the same concert: Payare was playing horn in the ensemble, and Weilerstein was the featured soloist for Dvořák’s cello concerto. The couple went out for sushi after a rehearsal and have been together ever since.
Now, Weilerstein and Payare travel all over the world for their music, often bringing their family along with them for their concerts. Payare is currently the Music Director of the San Diego Symphony and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal, with plenty of requests to star as a guest conductor with orchestras around the world. A graduate of the El Sistema program, the Venezuelan conductor has also made it a mission of his to lead various youth orchestra projects including the newly formed program with La musique aux enfants in Montreal.
When Weilerstein is not performing as a guest soloist alongside her husband and the San Diego Symphony, she is performing roughly 80 scheduled concerts every season. The cellist, who made her orchestra debut at age 13 with the Cleveland Orchestra, boasts an impressive array of chamber music collaborations as well. Her most recent endeavor is a multi-season project combining the 36 Bach solo cello suites with 27 new commissions by Elkhanah Pulitzer.
Rufus Wainwright and Jörn Weisbrodt
Our next couple met - and fell in love - through a musical. In 2012, then Artistic Director of the Luminato Festival Jörn Weisbrodt wanted to do a project at the Berlin Opera House, creating a musical out of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Foer was the librettist, and while he was looking for a music director, he stumbled across a Rufus Wainwright CD that a friend had given to him long ago.
Wainwright and his husband, German arts administrator Jörn Weisbrodt, in 2010 at the Metropolitan Opera.
At the time, Wainwright, a songwriter and singer, had recently released his seventh studio album Out of the Game and was touring to promote the album. Wainwright also had a huge love of opera, having written one, Prima Donna, in 2009. When Weisbrodt finally took a listen to Wainwright’s music, he was blown away by the artistry of the songs. Weisbrodt’s musical never came to fruition, but the encounter did spark the beginning of a love story.
Weisbrodt currently acts as Wainwright’s producer and manager. Together the duo have brought many of Wainwright’s musical ideas to life across various genres, from his recent Dream Requiem for Orchestra and Chorus, to a dive into folk music with Folkocracy.
