When I first met John Tavener in 1977, he was still largely known for his dramatic cantata The Whale, which had been performed at the Proms in 1969. By then both John and his Whale had acquired considerable glitter, partly by having the veteran newscaster Alvar Lidell associated with it, and partly through its eventual connection with the Beatles, who had issued it on their Apple label in 1970. He never wrote anything quite like it again, though one notices that even this early and iconoclastic piece is based on the bible.
I always wondered what his now famous religious sense really consisted of. I never fully bought the unsmiling preacher, which became his public persona in later life, since in private he was never like that. I originally met him because he had wanted to know more about the 16th-century composer and possible forebear of his, John Taverner, hoping in some degree to recreate Taverner’s style on his own terms. There was no religious impulse in this, nor was there in the many discussions we had concerning the music I commissioned from him. Our favourite activity was choosing texts to set by the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, not a man known for his religious beliefs. This led to a set of miniatures that has only been performed once so far, entitled Tribute to Cavafy. In my opinion this is not only a masterpiece, it also shows a different side to John’s genius from his more monumental later works.
His interest in the divine was more instinctive than formal. He loved miracles. For him, as for a medieval monk, they were everyday possibilities. He was quite capable of embellishing perfectly mundane conversations with the sudden memory of a saintly body, long buried, which had been disinterred uncorrupted and with a fragrant smell.
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