He has cornered success. Whatever Thomas Adès touches seems to transform into gold in an almost uncanny way. He is celebrated on the great stages of the world, by both the audience and critics alike.

At just 33, he was appointed to the Benjamin Britten Chair in Composition at the Royal Academy of Music. Today, conducting stars like Simon Rattle and Gustavo Dudamel perform his music. Adès's operas have premiered at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden and at the Salzburg Festival, and major orchestras are eager to perform his works, from the Los Angeles Philharmonic to the Amsterdam Concertgebouw and the Leipzig Gewandhaus. And one doesn’t have to be a prophet to foresee that this season, the audience of the Gürzenich Orchestra will also fall in love with Thomas Adès’s music.

However, this popularity was not handed to the composer. He was born on March 1, 1971, in London, to an art historian mother and a writer father. In an interview with The Times a few years ago, he openly confessed to having suffered from bullying as a teenager. “For one, I was fat,” Adès recalls, “and whenever physical activity was mentioned, I would feel ill. I hated rugby and wondered why anyone would expose themselves to the cold and mud.”

Carrying copies of James Joyce’s Ulysses under his arm made him the nerdy outsider. But most of all, he was taunted for his homosexuality. “I was mocked daily, it was quite hard. And it can be very burdensome when you think you’re the only one.”

In his helplessness and despair, the young man discovered music as a source of comfort and strength, fleeing into the endless sound worlds of Sibelius and Tchaikovsky – the promise of a better world.

You can still sense this in Thomas Adès' music today. Of course, it sounds brilliant, sparkling and skilfully crafted. But much more than that: it is of existential importance. ‘If I didn't compose, I would be unbearable, unmanageable, a stammering wreck wandering the streets muttering wildly,’ Adès confessed in an interview with The Times.

Thomas Adès is part of a whole group of composers who, despite having undergone the school of the avant-garde, eventually found their way back to traditional forms. He still feels connected to the classical-romantic tradition, the very music that carried him through difficult times in his youth.

What sets him apart from some of his otherwise rather conventional contemporaries, however, is the vibrant energy of his creations, the dazzling richness of his sounds, and above all, the memorability and recognizability of his ideas. For example, the beginning of his piano concerto immediately grabs the ear and the body with its strikingly jazzy rhythms.

No wonder, as the composer is himself an excellent pianist: “The piano is my home, just as other people are at home in their swimming pools.” His first opera, Powder Her Face, became famous not only because its plot delicately navigates between imagination, sensationalism, and scandal, but also because of its immensely catchy music, which at times surfs quite skillfully on the waves of samba and bossa nova.

All of these pieces are impactful, but by no means simple: In his Violin Concerto, for example, the soloist and the orchestra sometimes play in different time signatures and tempos. Here, Adès draws on avant-garde techniques. At the same time, he has no qualms about engaging with pop music: for instance, he re-arranged Cardiac Arrest, a hit from the 80s band Madness.

It’s hard to believe how seemingly effortlessly Thomas Adès combines such contrasts. Having personally experienced painful exclusion, he now works to overcome boundaries—always with the aim: “To struggle for beauty, even if I can never fully reach it.”