The Silence the Whole World Heard
There are moments when music does not perform so much as preside. On a September morning in 1997, inside Westminster Abbey, a choir began to sing, and the sound that rose was not grand or loud. It was slow, spare and still, each note given room to breathe before the next one arrived. Millions of people watching around the world had never heard anything quite like it, and most of them had never heard the name of the man who wrote it. The piece was “Song for Athene.” Its composer was John Tavener, an Englishman who had spent a lifetime learning how to make silence audible.
Thirteen years after his death, Tavener’s music still does the same quiet work. It does not hurry or show off; it asks the listener to stop, listen and wait — and in an age of noise, that patience is its power. This is the story of how a boy from Wembley, woken up by a single piece of music at twelve, became one of the best known composers of his generation, and gave the world a sound for grief itself.
A Boy from Wembley
John Kenneth Tavener was born on 28 January 1944, in Wembley, London. His parents ran a family building firm, and the household was an ordinary post-war London one in most respects. But there was music in it from the start. His father was also an organist at St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Frognal, Hampstead, so the boy grew up within earshot of hymns, organ voluntaries and the weekly discipline of church music. The building trade gave the family its living; the church gave the young Tavener his first musical home.
The first great arrest came when he was twelve years old. He was taken to Glyndebourne to hear Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” a work he loved for the rest of his life. In the same year, 1956, he heard Stravinsky’s most recent work, “Canticum Sacrum.” The effect was decisive. Years later he would describe the Stravinsky as “the piece that woke me up and made me want to be a composer.” It is a telling phrase. He did not say the piece taught him, or inspired him, or impressed him. He said it woke him up — as though, until that moment, some part of him had been asleep, and the music had called it into the light. For a composer whose mature work would be so much about stillness, awakening and light, the choice of words feels prophetic.
School, Choir and the Piano
Tavener became a music scholar at Highgate School, where a fellow pupil was John Rutter, who would himself become one of Britain’s best-loved choral composers. The school choir was often employed by the BBC in works requiring boys’ voices, and through it Tavener gained early choral experience singing in Mahler’s Third Symphony and Orff’s “Carmina Burana.” To sing in those vast scores as a schoolboy was an education no classroom could give: he learned, from the inside, what many voices held together could summon.
He started to compose at Highgate, and he also became a sufficiently proficient pianist to perform the second and third movements of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto and, in 1961 with the National Youth Orchestra, Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2. For a time, it seemed the piano might be his path. In the same year, 1961, he became organist and choirmaster at St John’s Presbyterian Church, Kensington — now St Mark’s Coptic Orthodox Church — a post he held for fourteen years. The organ loft and the choir stalls were becoming his natural habitat.
In 1962 he entered the Royal Academy of Music, where his tutors included Sir Lennox Berkeley. During his studies there he made a decision that would define his life: he gave up the piano and devoted himself to composition. It was a narrowing, but a fruitful one. The performer stepped aside so that the composer could come forward. From that point on, Tavener’s instrument would be other people’s voices and hands — choirs, orchestras, soloists — and his task would be to give them music worth the giving.
The Whale
Tavener first came to prominence in 1968 with his dramatic cantata “The Whale,” based on the Old Testament story of Jonah. He was twenty-four years old. The work was premiered at the London Sinfonietta’s debut concert, which was also the opening concert of the Queen Elizabeth Hall. To have a new work chosen for such an occasion — the debut of a new ensemble, the opening of a new hall — was a mark of extraordinary confidence on the part of those who programmed it. The confidence was repaid.
The Guardian described the young composer as “the musical discovery of the year,” while The Times said he was “among the very best creative talents of his generation.” In the space of a single evening, Tavener had gone from a promising student to a name the critics were watching. The early music that had brought him there was influenced by Igor Stravinsky and Olivier Messiaen — often invoking the sound world of Stravinsky, in particular his “Canticum Sacrum,” the very piece that had woken him up at twelve, and the ecstatic quality found in various works by Messiaen. Then came a twist that no one could have scripted. Tavener’s younger brother, Roger, was doing some building work on Ringo Starr’s home — the family building firm, reaching unexpectedly into the world of pop — and, gaining the musician’s interest, persuaded the Beatles to have “The Whale” recorded by Apple Records. The recording was released in 1970. A twenty-something composer of a biblical cantata, on the Beatles’ own label: it was the kind of detail that makes Tavener’s story unlike any other composer’s of his generation. The following year, in 1971, he began teaching at Trinity College of Music, London.
Other works by Tavener released by Apple included his “A Celtic Requiem,” which impressed Benjamin Britten enough to persuade Covent Garden to commission an opera from Tavener. Britten’s advocacy mattered. He was the towering figure of British music, and his willingness to press for a commission was a serious endorsement. The ultimate result, to a libretto by playwright Gerard McLarnon, was “Thérèse,” the story of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. When it was staged in 1979, the opera was thought too static to be a successful drama. It was a setback, and an instructive one: Tavener’s gift was for stillness and contemplation, qualities that can transfix a concert hall and stall a stage.
Love, Loss and the Road to Orthodoxy
Tavener had also been deeply affected by his brief 1974 marriage to the Greek dancer Victoria Maragopoulou. The marriage lasted eight months. Its brevity, and the pain it carried, left a mark on the music that followed. His chamber opera “A Gentle Spirit” (1977), with a libretto by McLarnon based on a story by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, concerns a pawnbroker whose marriage fails to the extent that his wife commits suicide. It has been deemed far superior to “Thérèse,” with the internal drama more suited to the stage. Significantly, it also touched on Russian Orthodoxy, to which McLarnon had been a convert for several years. Through his collaborator, and through his own reading and searching, Tavener was drawing closer to a tradition that would remake his music.
In 1977, the same year as “A Gentle Spirit,” Tavener converted to the Orthodox Church. Orthodox theology and liturgical traditions became a major influence on his work. He was particularly drawn to its mysticism, studying and setting to music the writings of Church Fathers and completing a setting of the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, the principal eucharistic liturgy of the Orthodox Church. This was his first directly Orthodox-inspired music, and it was a beginning rather than a destination: the chant, the icons, the sense of worship as something timeless and unhurried would become the centre of everything he wrote from then on.
It was not a change of subject matter; it was a change of musical language. The busy, complex textures of his early work began to thin out. In their place came something sparser: long lines, wide spaces between registers, harmonies that moved slowly and stayed diatonically tonal. He recognised Arvo Pärt as “a kindred spirit,” and shared with him a common religious tradition and a fondness for textural transparency.
An Afternoon’s Work: The Lamb
If one piece of Tavener’s were to survive alone, it might be “The Lamb.” His subsequent explorations of Russian and Greek culture had produced the “Akhmatova Requiem,” which failed to enjoy success either at its Edinburgh Festival premiere in 1981 or at its Proms performance the following week, where many of the audience left before it finished. It was a public disappointment, and it makes what happened next all the more remarkable.
In 1982, Tavener wrote his short unaccompanied four-part choral setting of William Blake’s poem “The Lamb” in a single afternoon, for his nephew Simon’s third birthday. A birthday present, written in an afternoon, has no right to become one of the most loved choral pieces in the English language — and yet it did. The piece is simple and homophonic, its chords moving together in quiet blocks, and it is usually performed as a Christmas carol. Blake’s poem asks a childlike question — “Little Lamb, who made thee?” — and answers it with a child’s certainty: the Lamb who made the lamb is the Lamb of God. Tavener’s setting does not decorate the words. It lets them stand, plain and luminous, as though the music were simply the poem breathing.
The Protecting Veil
The years that followed brought a steady flow of prominent works. “The Akathist of Thanksgiving” of 1987 was written in celebration of the millennium of the Russian Orthodox Church — a thousand years of faith, honoured in music. Then, in 1989, came the work that would make Tavener’s name known far beyond the world of contemporary classical music.
“The Protecting Veil” was first performed by cellist Steven Isserlis and the London Symphony Orchestra at the 1989 Proms, on 4 September 1989. It is a single, sustained meditation for cello and orchestra, inspired by the Orthodox feast of the Protecting Veil of the Mother of God. Where “The Lamb” is a miniature, “The Protecting Veil” is a long, arching span — the cello singing, almost without pause, above an orchestra that moves like slow weather. As recorded by Isserlis, it became a best-selling album, one of those rare classical recordings that crossed over into the wider culture and stayed there.
Its success made Tavener one of the best known and most popular composers of his generation. But the success never changed the music. Isserlis, who knew him well, would later say of him: “He had his own voice. He wasn’t writing to be popular — he was writing the music he had to write.”
Song for Athene
In 1993, Tavener wrote “Song for Athene.” Like “The Lamb,” it was a setting of a text by Mother Thekla, a Russian Orthodox abbess who was Tavener’s long-time spiritual adviser until her death in 2011. The two choral works — “The Lamb” and “Song for Athene” — were both settings of texts associated with her, and that thread of spiritual friendship runs quietly through Tavener’s middle years. Mother Thekla was not a public figure, but for Tavener she was a guide, and the music he wrote from her words carries that intimacy.
“Song for Athene” gained worldwide exposure when it was performed at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997. The choice of music for that day was a moment of national mourning, watched by millions, and the sound Tavener provided — slow, still, unadorned — gave the ceremony its emotional centre. The piece was not written for Diana, and it was not written for a funeral. It was written four years earlier, as a piece of sacred music. But its stillness fitted the occasion so exactly that it has been bound to it ever since, and for many listeners the name John Tavener will always be the name attached to that morning’s singing.
The Millennium and the Great Works
As the twentieth century drew to a close, Tavener’s standing was confirmed in the most public ways. He wrote the composition “A New Beginning” to commemorate the Millennium celebrations on New Year’s Eve, 1999, during the opening of the Millennium Dome in London. He was knighted in 2000 for his services to music, and he won an Ivor Novello Award. In 2001 he was awarded an Honorary Fellowship by Sarum College. The boy from Wembley was now Sir John Tavener, and the honours sat lightly on a man whose music had always pointed away from himself.
The new century brought large, ambitious works. “Fall and Resurrection,” first performed in 2000 — its premiere was given in St Paul’s Cathedral, London, on 4 January 2000 — used instruments such as ram’s horn, Ney flute and kaval, and was dedicated to the then Prince of Wales, with whom Tavener formed a lasting friendship.
His work “Ikon of Eros” (2003) was commissioned for violinist Jorja Fleezanis, then concertmaster of the Minnesota Orchestra, with vocal soloists and the Minnesota Chorale, and recorded at the Cathedral of St Paul, conducted by Paul Goodwin. Also in 2003, Tavener composed the exceptionally large work “The Veil of the Temple,” which was premiered at the Temple Church, London, based on texts from a number of religions. Identified by Tavener as “the supreme achievement of my life,” it is set for four choirs, several orchestras and soloists and lasts at least seven hours. Seven hours: a vigil that begins in the evening and ends after midnight, a work that asks its audience to give up a night rather than an hour. It is the fullest expression of what Tavener believed music could be — not entertainment, but a vigil, a watching, a staying awake in the presence of the sacred.
In 2004, “Prayer of the Heart,” written for and performed by Björk, was premiered — a reminder that Tavener’s stillness could speak to artists far outside the classical world. In 2007 he composed “The Beautiful Names,” a setting of the 99 names of God in the Muslim tradition, sung in Arabic. Its premiere was given by the BBC Symphony Chorus and Orchestra at Westminster Cathedral, and in the same year he was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Winchester.
A Universalist Heart
The late works raised a question that followed Tavener in the British press: had he left Orthodox Christianity to explore other religious traditions, including Hinduism and Islam, and become a follower of the Traditionalist philosopher Frithjof Schuon? The reports were persistent, and Tavener answered them with characteristic honesty. In an interview with The New York Times, conducted by British music journalist Michael White, he said: “I reached a point where everything I wrote was terribly austere and hidebound by the tonal system of the Orthodox Church, and I felt the need, in my music at least, to become more universalist: to take in other colors, other languages.” The interviewer also reported at the time that he “hasn’t abandoned Orthodoxy. He remains devotedly Christian.”
Speaking on the BBC Four television programme “Sacred Music” in 2010, Tavener described himself as “essentially Orthodox.” He reiterated both his desire to explore the musical traditions of other religions and his adherence to the Orthodox Christian faith on “Start the Week,” recorded only days before his death and broadcast on 11 November 2013. The picture that emerges is not of a man who left his faith, but of one whose faith had grown wide enough to listen to others. The music of his last years — the Arabic setting of “The Beautiful Names,” the texts of many religions in “The Veil of the Temple” — is the sound of that widening.
A Fragile Body, a Steady Hand
Behind the music was a body that gave Tavener little peace. He had considerable health problems throughout his life. He had a stroke in his thirties, heart surgery and the removal of a tumour in his forties, and two successive heart attacks which left him frail. He was diagnosed with Marfan syndrome in 1990, a condition that affects the body’s connective tissue and, in his case, the heart. His wife, Lady Tavener, broadcast a charity appeal on BBC Radio 4 in October 2008 on behalf of the Marfan Trust. The fragility was not a secret, and it was not a metaphor. It was a daily fact, and it makes the steadiness of the music all the more remarkable. The man who wrote about stillness knew, in his own body, how hard stillness is to hold.
He had an interest in classic cars, owning an Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire, a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, a Jaguar XJ6 and a white Bentley Mulsanne Turbo, and he was noted for wearing a white suit — a composer in white, like a figure from an icon.
His personal life, after the brief first marriage, found its centre in 1991, when he married Maryanna Schaefer, with whom he had three children, Theodora, Sofia and Orlando. The family home was in Dorset, and it was there, in the quiet of the countryside, that the last years were lived. The music kept coming, sparse and luminous, even as the body faltered. In April 2013, “Tolstoy’s Creed” and “Three Hymns of George Herbert” were premiered by the City Choir of Washington at the Washington National Cathedral. On 7 July 2013, “Love Duet from The Play of Krishna,” “If Ye Love Me” and “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” were premiered during an all-Tavener concert given as part of the Manchester International Festival. He was still writing, still being heard, four months before he died.
The Final Year and Farewell
Tavener’s final opera, “Krishna,” was completed in 2005 but had remained in manuscript form. In 2020, Sir David Pountney, former artistic director of the Welsh National Opera, announced that it would be staged by Grange Park Opera, with Pountney himself directing — a reminder that a composer’s work does not end with his death, and that manuscripts can wait, patiently, for their hour.
Tavener died, aged 69, on 12 November 2013, at his home in Child Okeford, Dorset. The tributes that followed came from across the music world: composers John Rutter and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, cellist Steven Isserlis, Neil Portnow, president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, oboist Nicholas Daniel, Roger Wright, controller of BBC Radio 3 and director of the Proms, and soprano Patricia Rozario. A tribute was also received from Charles, Prince of Wales, the friend to whom “Fall and Resurrection” had been dedicated.
His funeral was held at Winchester Cathedral on 28 November 2013. The service was conducted in the Orthodox rite and was presided over by Archbishop Gregorios of Thyateira, representative of the Ecumenical Patriarch and the most senior Orthodox bishop in the UK. About 700 mourners attended.
John Rutter, his schoolfellow from Highgate, described Tavener as having the “very rare gift” of being able to “bring an audience to a deep silence.” It is the finest epitaph a composer could wish for, and the truest. Tavener’s gift was not to fill a hall with sound, but to bring a hall to silence — and then to let the silence itself sing.
The Sound That Remains
What remains, thirteen years on, is a body of work that refuses to age. “The Lamb” is still sung at Christmas, and “The Lamb” was heard in Paolo Sorrentino’s film “The Great Beauty.” Excerpts of his “Funeral Canticle” were used in Terrence Malick’s film “The Tree of Life,” and he contributed “Fragments of a Prayer” to Alfonso Cuarón’s film “Children of Men” in 2006 — the stillness finding new screens and new audiences.
Tavener’s musical style, in the end, is easy to describe and hard to imitate: sparse, diatonically tonal, built on wide registral space, with a transparency he shared with his kindred spirit Arvo Pärt. The difficulty is not in the notes. It is in the courage to leave space around them — to trust that a single chord, held long enough, can say more than a hundred notes hurried past. Most composers fill time. Tavener honoured it.
He was a man who heard a piece of music at twelve and was woken up by it; who was discovered at twenty-four and recorded by the Beatles; who lost his way, found a faith, and then found a wider faith still; who wrote a masterpiece in an afternoon for a three-year-old’s birthday; whose body failed him again and again while his music did not; and who died at home in Dorset on a November day, leaving behind a sound the world still needs. The world first heard him, most of it, on a morning of grief in 1997. It is still listening. And in the stillness he taught us to hear, the music goes on — slow, spare and luminous, like light coming through a high window, long after the singer has gone.
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