John Tavener
At a time of unprecedented cultural and musical diversity, John Tavener has remained a consistent and powerfully unique voice. He first came to public attention in 1968 with the premiere of his oratorio The Whale at the inaugural concert of the London Sinfonietta. The work came to the attention of The Beatles and was subsequently recorded on their Apple label. Although Tavener’s avant-garde style of the 1970s contrasts with the contemplative beauty of his works for which he is best known, the seeds of the language he would later adopt were already in evidence. His use of children’s voices in his first BBC Proms’ commission, In Alium (1968) and the Celtic Requiem (1969) demonstrate a fascination with childish innocence that permeates his entire oeuvre. His early compositions, notably Th´rèse (1973) commissioned by the Royal Opera House and A Gentle Spirit (1977) after the short story by Dostoyevsky, showed that spirituality and mysticism were to be his primary sources of inspiration.
Throughout the 1970s Tavener became increasingly uncomfortable with what he saw as an over-intellectualisation of western classical music. His conversion to the Orthodox Church in 1977 resulted from his growing conviction that Eastern traditions retained a primordial essence that the west had lost. From this time, his musical language moved towards a self-abnegating ethereal beauty, often reminiscent of the music of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Works such as Funeral Ikos (1981), The Lamb (1982), Ikon of Light (1984) and the large-scale choral work Resurrection (1989) date from this period.
It was in 1989 that Tavener once again came firmly into the limelight, when the BBC Proms’ premiere of The Protecting Veil introduced his music to a new audience. The opera Mary of Egypt, which was premiered at the 1992 Aldeburgh Festival, marked the start of his continuing collaboration with the soprano Patricia Rozario. The same year, a major documentary, Glimpses of Paradise was broadcast on BBC2. His 50th birthday was marked in 1994 by the BBC’s Ikons Festival as well as another major BBC Proms’ commission, The Apocalypse. In 1997, the performance of Song for Athene at the close of Princess Diana’s funeral showed that the profound effect of his music reached far beyond just the concert-going public and led to a surge of press interest, including another documentary on London Weekend Television’s South Bank Show. The huge interest in Tavener’s music showed no signs of abating; the premiere of A New Beginning played out the final minutes of 1999 in London’s Millennium Dome; on 4 January 2000, Fall and Resurrection was premiered at St Paul’s Cathedral, broadcast on both television and radio; he received a Knighthood in the Millennium Honours List, and later the same year, London’s South Bank Centre presented a major festival of his music. The increasing number of overseas commissions — notably Lamentations and Praises (2000) for the San Francisco-based Chanticleer (whose recording of the work secured for Tavener the Grammy award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition in 2003) and Ikon of Eros (2001) for the Minnesota Orchestra — gave testament to the fact that Tavener’s music was speaking to an international audience.
Around this time, it became clear that Tavener was beginning to move in a significant new direction, as Orthodox sources began to give way to influences from other cultures. This change was perhaps foreshadowed by the use of Hindu rhythms in works like Samaveda (1997) and Song of the Cosmos (2000), and his use of instruments such as the Tibetan Temple Bowl in many works of the 1990s. Tavener says that it was while he was writing the eight-hour epic The Veil of the Temple (2001), that he found he needed to look further than just Orthodoxy to express his message. He was led to look for inspiration from alternative sources by his interest in the universalist philosophy of the late Swiss metaphysician Fritjhof Schuon, which embraces all great religious traditions. This change in direction is manifest in works written since 2001 — notably The Veil of the Temple, Lament for Jerusalem (which uses both Christian and Islamic texts), and Hymn of Dawn, based on Hindu, Sufi, Christian and Jewish texts, as well as the music of the American Indians.