John Tavener's inspiration

'I had a dream vision'

John Tavener tells Charlotte Higgins how his life-changing encounter with an Apache medicine man led him to write a piece praising Allah for the Prince of Wales

Monday June 11, 2007

The Guardian


John Tavener does not fit into his surroundings. This tall, etiolated, sunbaked 63-year-old with lanky shoulder-length blond hair, dressed in white linen trousers and shirt, looks as if he would be more appropriately placed in a setting of either John Pawson-style minimalism or byzantine, gilded splendour. Not in a Dorset farmhouse with chickens in the garden, wellies on the bootstand, squashy sofas in the sitting room and a flatscreen telly. This is, after all, the composer of the night-long meditational piece The Veil of the Temple; and Song for Athene, which was performed at Diana's funeral and confirmed him as a household name. He is the composer, in other words, of deeply spiritual, otherworldly, heartfelt, heartstopping music. Or bland, populist, new-age pap - depending on your point of view.

The next big moment for Tavener is the premiere of a large-scale piece for chorus and orchestra. It has been commissioned by the Prince of Wales, with whom he became friends more than a decade ago "because we share views on the importance of all religious traditions". Again, what you will make of this one depends on your point of view. It's called The Beautiful Names, and it's a setting of the 99 names for Allah from the Qur'an. It's going to be performed in the Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral next week, then a few days later in Istanbul. Tavener is Greek Orthodox, to which he converted years ago after a Presbyterian upbringing.
You could see The Beautiful Names as a moving congruence of disparate religions in difficult times. Or then again, you could you assign it to roughly the same category as talking to your plants or having a manservant charge your toothbrush. I should be upfront here: my inclination is to go with the latter view.

Tavener, though, is fantastically disarming. When he starts talking about his music being written through divine agency and having visions brought on by chatting to Apache medicine men and what a bad idea the Enlightenment was, part of you wants to snort with derision. The other part realises that, however batty it all sounds, he means it, and it's real for him. If a sense of conviction is a defence these days (and according to Tony Blair, it is), then at least you can say of Tavener: it's not phoney.

In recent years he has begun to broaden his spiritual horizons, he tells me over tea in the garden. "The path I follow is still an Orthodox path," he says. "You have to follow a path, otherwise it becomes a little bit new-age, a bit of this, a bit of that ... But I suppose I had a dream vision after a visit from an Apache Indian medicine man. Many people when they've met American Indians have very strong dreams afterwards. I had a kind of vision from the Sufi Frithjof Schuon, who was a believer in the inner transcendent unity of all religions. And he seemed to be giving me permission, in a way, to work musically within other traditions. It wasn't that the Christian thing was failing me in any way, but rather that it enriched it by going into other things, particularly Hinduism and Sufism."

He is planning a choral piece called The Flood of Beauty, a setting of a 9th-century Sanskrit poem that "shows God in the feminine aspect, as beauty". There's also the premiere in Zurich this year of a Mass for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. In his note on the piece, he writes: "I have used Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic, Aramaic, Greek, American Indian, German and Italian to express something of the divine effulgence of the feminine that the Mother of God has revealed to my soul."

One of the dedicatees of the work is Pope Benedict. Tavener is an admirer, then? "Sort of, because he's a traditionalist, and I think that's very important. Part of the senility of religion, I seriously believe, is Vatican Two [an Ecumenical Council of the Vatican which held sessions between 1962-65]. It was the third betrayal of Christ. Where they started throwing out Latin and all the best music ... I think it was a downward path for the Catholic church. It was trying to modernise religion. They are eternal truths and if you try to modernise it, it just becomes ridiculous."

The Enlightenment, and the art associated with it, is just as bad: "In his late quartets, Beethoven introduces an element that shouldn't be there, that should be left for meditation, though I love them. I can see that through them came Wagner and Mahler and Schoenberg and Berg. And then came Tracey Emin. And I can see it all as one downward path."

According to Hindu metaphysics, says Tavener, we are reaching the end of a long cosmic cycle. This accounts for the amount of religious fundamentalism now, which he likens to the senility of old age. In art, does Emin represent the bottom of the cycle, I wonder. "No, it will go much further than that!" he exclaims delightedly. "She's a funny little thing, isn't she?"

The idea of the eternal feminine is important to Tavener. He tells me about a visionary to whom the Virgin Mary would appear, always naked. I am not sure Pope Benedict would approve. He says Mary "feels closer to me than Christ. I can't explain that - she's much more mysterious because there's so little known about her, yet she seems very active in the world in an extraordinary way." He doesn't say how. "I think our society at the moment - because I am a great critic of modernism - is very masculine-oriented, and the art I see and hear around me has gone beyond masculinity, it doesn't even possess the dignity of being masculine any longer. It is very aggressive and violent. And the feminine dimension is what everyone could do with having a good dose of." The feminine represents mercy and love, he says.

It's not just the essence of the feminine, it's women, "though a lot of rubbish has been written about me and women," he says. His first marriage, to a Greek dancer, was annulled. He never moved in with her, preferring to remain in the maternal home in Wembley Park in London ("I think my brother thinks she spoiled me terribly"). He was in his early 30s. "Even the prophet Mohammed said that the things that were most pleasing to him in this world were women and perfumes. I think women actually have that effect on me. Every woman I have known has actually deepened my spiritual awareness. Even if I have been a selfish man and treated them badly ... There were two women, I won't name them, who had a powerful religious effect on me. The ancient idea of a muse is there. It wasn't so much an erotic thing, though you can't leave the erotic out of it."

Tavener is now married again, to Maryanna, "who has bullied me into having children and continues to bully me, which is good. If I had any ego left, she is very good at demolishing it." They have three children: girls of 14 and 13 and a baby boy. I find it hard to imagine Tavener the family man, even faced with its reality. Maryanna tells me later that he accompanies the girls at the piano on their musical instruments, but he always leads, and also that he does all the cooking, mostly south Indian curries. He never thought he'd have children "in a million years" but "I can't be grateful enough that Maryanna pushed me into it, and even into a third". When he works here, as opposed to in Evia, in Greece, where there's a house to which he retreats several times a year, he occupies a room "exactly in the centre of the house. I quite like being in the centre, among all the noises that the children make."

The inspiration behind the work, behind the music, comes straight from God, Tavener believes; and it is the beauty of nature, and the world, that engenders his belief in the divine. "When something extraordinary happens to me - or it doesn't have to be extraordinary, I mean if you see a wonderful sunset or plunge into the sea and swim - my immediate reaction has always been, and is even more so now, thank God for this. The music is something outside myself, that's also inside myself ... Music and a sense of another presence always went hand in hand. Even when I was three, I would improvise music, and my maternal grandfather would act as an audience and used to applaud. I would imitate things like thunder and rain."

Tavener owns an old Bentley, the same as Prince Charles'. When the photographer comes, he is driving a 1968 Bristol, and Tavener gets excited. After taking some portraits, the photographer lets him sit in the driver's seat. As I get into Maryanna's car and she eases out down the drive to take me to the station, I can still see him. He's smiling in pure wonderment; not moving.