Obituary: John Tavener

Some would call this consummate talent,even genius. He saw it entirely differently. His music was a gift from God,already composed since before the beginning of time,which he would merely discover rather than write. It was sacred revelation,a contact with realms beyond reality,which brought him transcendent joy. Among 20th-century composers for none of whom,save Stravinsky and Messaien,he had a good word to say he occupied a place apart: preferably not a clinical,humanist concert hall,but a cathedral,or,even better,a curved and cruciform Greek chapel dark but for candlelight.

His musical ambition was to find the Voice: both his own musical voice,and the sound of God. On the evidence of his works from the 1980s onwards,after his conversion to the Orthodox church and his collaboration with a feisty nun,Mother Thekla,on liturgical texts,God was long-paced and slow,underpinned by chants and Byzantine drones,woven round by antiphonal choirs and accompanied by gongs and bells. Having stripped away all systems and development in music theory always being hateful to him,having thrown out the Western canon,even Bach,as too emotional and subjective,he was left with music as primordial and eternal as the landscape of the Greece he loved. Much of it sprang from the simplicity of prayer Save me,or Have mercy on me,a sinner and sparse,serial clusters of notes. One particular chord soprano B,alto G,tenor C,bass A he called joy/sorrow,and thought of as his. A sweeter register evoked the Mother of God,in pieces marked beyond compassion that we can comprehend: a soprano,or a cello,singing eternal cosmic comfort,as in The Protecting Veil,whose shimmering beauty spread his fame round the world.

God,though,did not suddenly possess him when he converted. Even his earliest finished music,a setting of John Donnes darker sonnets at the age of 18,was something,he told a girlfriend,that I owe to GOD for what he has given me. The Whale,the piece that got him noticed in 1968 as well as into Vogue,and into brief partnership with the Beatles was Gods too,with all its wild cacophony of football rattles,fire engines,loudhailers and readings from the encyclopedia. So was the Celtic Requiem,which featured hopscotch-playing children and Irish keening. For a while he embraced the Catholic mysticism of St John of the Cross,which led to stupendous explosions of timpani. As an organist in Kensington for 14 years,the passion of God in him often induced him to play with all the stops out; at the piano,like some flagellant,he might improvise until the hammers broke and his fingers bled on the keys.

Death as Muse

He was no saint,though. With all the arrogance of a boy whose musical gifts had excused him from games at Highgate school and chores at home,he tolerated nothing that stood in the way of his music-making. There was vanity in the sempiternal deep tan,the long hair and open shirts and large silver crucifixes,as well as the hawk-like stare from his immense height; there was crass materialism as well as much convivial happiness in eating,copious drinking and the driving of fast,beautiful cars. He understood the need for humility to receive the Spirit,and often preached it. But the practice lagged behind.

It was the presence of death that eventually imposed it. Ill with genetic heart trouble for much of his life,occasionally disabled for months by strokes and heart attacks,he felt death alongside him like a spouse. His output contained so many requiems,or pieces based on the Crucifixion,that it sometimes seemed to him that death was the main source of his inspiration. The hardest death to cope with,that of his mother with whom he had lived in the family house in Wembley Park for 41 years,composing at the dining table was transmuted under the saving light of Greece into Eis Thanaton,in which a soprano comforting her son from heaven became the voice of the Mother of God.

Old age reconciled him a little to the Western canon,especially the late works of Beethoven. He had not,however,found the Voice yet,or not completely. It had emerged neither from complexity nor simplicity; neither from the deepest bass ison,or drone note,nor from the choir he had asked to sing at the threshold of audibility. He still hoped,though,for transparency. His music,like an icon,should show not what was there but what lay beyond it: the divine light and divine sound which was,in the end,silence.