LIFE
LIFE
The Road to Calvary
1969 saw Tavener installed at Trinity College as professor of Composition, and in the same year, Britten invited him to write a full length opera for the Royal Opera House. He was still in his twenties - there were no worries that he was rising too fast, but something had to give.
He became dogged by increasingly longer 'dead periods' : up til now the shape of each work had revealed itself to him in a single vision. He began to fear he would never compose again, that each work would be his last. The Opera took a long time: at first he began setting 'Notre Dame des Fleurs' by Genet, but this was abandoned. In the meantime, he received a large commission from Mario di Bonaventura: Ultimos Ritos - to be performed in the Cathedral of St Bavo in Haarlem. It took him three years to finish, but incorporated two earlier pieces: 'Coplas' and 'Nomine Jesu' from the seventies. However the inspiration for Ultimos Ritos came from the Crucifixus of Bach's B Minor Mass, which he heard on the car radio. The texts of the work were from St John of The Cross' 'Dark night of the Soul'. The work demands certain spatial arrangements of the players: soloists and groups in the extremities of the building, while the performers are arranged centrally in the form of a cross. This kind of spatial arrangement was a common feature of the time: used by Stockhausen among others.
The fp was a disaster: the tape machine, which was to quote the Bach phrase broke down, and the TV cameras got in the way. However the work itself was well received by the critics: there were further performances in Winchester and Westminster Cathedrals.
The earlier composition 'Notre dame', had been meanwhile finished and taped. However Tavener was not satisfied with it: he began to toy with the idea of an Opera on the life of St Therese. The Irish-born playwright Gerard McLarnon agreed to write a libretto. But Tavener was blocked. Progress was painful: outside help and structures were sought: eventually a palindromic form was constructed (cf Berg's Lulu) in a single 2 hour act. It played to full houses in 1979, but was dismissed by the press.
Immediately after finishing Therese the same team began work on a chamber opera 'A Gentle Spirit' based on a Dostoyoskvy story. It premiered in Bath in 1977 (before Therese). However it was clear something had to change: in 1977 he was received into the Russian Orthodox Church, Gerard McLarnon was also a convert. He had as a teenager met the Carmelite Father Malachy Lynch through whom he was able to meet Metropolitan Anthony, head of the Orthodox Church in the west. He described entering the Orthodox church as 'a homecoming'.
Despite his new found faith, life was still a struggle: he was drinking 'far too much whisky' and fretting over the breakup of his first marriage, in 1974, to Vicky Maragopoulou. a ballerina 10 years his junior (it had lasted 8 months) - he still lacked a sense of direction.
Since his conversion his work has been more and more tailored to the liturgical needs of the church. In the early 1980s his health began to deteriorate ( he has Marfan's syndrome which causes cardiovascular abnormalities). He became increasingly introspective: he sketched out 'The Apocalypse while seriously ill, awaiting heart surgery in 1990. A tumour had to be removed from his jaw.He actually died on the operating table and was resucsitated by the surgical team. It was 50-50 whether he would survive at all. Death was to be a constant musical and metaphysical companion. 'Before my illness I'd always had a morbid fear of death, but since the operation, death has become one's spouse. It's not terrifying any more. The possibility of eternal life is always there, but no-one can tell you. The Roman Church will tell you, if you do this you'll go there, if you do that you'll go someplace else. It feels as if you're arriving at Heathrow Airport. But we don't know the judgment of God - no-one knows'.
He wanted to achieve some permanence with his second wife Maryanna , again much younger than him, who he married in 1991. He'd been worried that having children would stop his composition, but eventually decided to put his faith in prayer. 'Fatherhood '(he has two daughters) 'hasn't been as bad as I thought it would be, and it's made no difference to my writing. It might just have made me marginally less selfish'.
1991 saw the beginning of his relationship with Mother Thekla, the 80-year old Orthodox nun dominate his life. His mother was dying and he was phoning mother Thekla on a daily basis at her convent in Yorkshire. He said he would write no more music: Mother Thekla said he must. She went on to collaborate on the libretto of 'Mary of Egypt' and several other pieces since.
Orthodoxy did however resurrect Tavener as a composer. He describes how his works became 'icons with notes rather than colours'. Redefining himself, he turned against the humanism of Beethoven -corrupted as he puts it 'by the cult of the artist'. He works in the sacred tradition, using what he calls 'the intellective organ of the heart': neither the dry academism of most of his contemporaries, nor the romantic self delusion of the 19th century. 'The religious tradition says that only the spontaneous is true - if I find myself trying to write and it's not spontaneous, it doesn't come. Once I start thinking about it or finding it difficult to do so then I scrap it. And that's completely the opposite of the western concept of composition - the idea of someone slaving over something to get it right.'
