I absolutely love the queer history behind this painfully beautiful piece. Benjamin Britten made sure to set this ode to his confidant and lover, Sir Peter Pears, to Italian text, so that when the pair performed the Seven Sonnets at Wigmore Hall, the audience would have no idea that they were using their performance to publicly profess their love for one another. Their love was forced to hide in plain sight, as, at the time, it was still illegal to be homosexual in England. Even more poignantly, Britten's friend in life and academia, W. H. Auden, recommended that Britten use the poetry of the Renaissance painter Michelangelo, due to a recent republishing of his sonnets which revealed a queer infatuation of his own. Britten's use of Michelangelo's queer poetry imbues the entire song cycle with an incredibly significant, two-fold legacy of queerness!