John Tavener began composing in 1957 at Highgate School in London, where he also played piano and sang in the school’s choir. In 1961, he became choirmaster and organist at St. John’s Presbyterian Church. The following year, he joined the Royal Academy of Music, where he studied with the Australian composer David Lumsdaine, who introduced him to avant-garde European music. Tavener retained little from this music, believing it to be pompous. This did not, however, stop him from borrowing compositional techniques from serialism in pieces such as The Lamb (1982). This brought Tavener closer to the work of Arvo Pärt. These composers are often associated with the post-modernist movement.

Tavener met public success at twenty-three years old with his piece The Whale (1967), debuted during London Sinfonietta’s inaugural concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in January 1968. This piece mixes recited descriptions of the whale from the Collins Encyclopedia with improvisation and collages of cartoons. After being passed along to Ringo Starr, it was published by Apple Records, the Beatles’ label.

As Tavener’s spirituality went through several stages of evolution over the course of his life, almost all of his music is religious and vocal. At the beginning of the 1970s, his work was influenced by the poetry of Saint John of the Cross and its theme of transcendental love, apparent in pieces such as Últimos Ritos (Last Rights, 1969-72), Nomine Jesu, and Coplas (1970). Through his education, he became interested in Roman Catholicism.

At the request of Benjamin Britten, Covent Garden commissioned an opera from Tavener. For this, he chose to write about Thérèse of Lisieux. Thérèse (1973) was a critical failure and led to a profound spiritual and musical crisis, coinciding with the collapse of his marriage. His conversion to the Russian Orthodox Church in 1977 signaled the end of his spiritual crisis, as he immersed himself in the Orthodox ecclesiastical music tradition and used it as inspiration for his new works, such as Kyklike Kinesis and Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom (1977). In 1979, at thirty-five years old, a stroke marked the beginning of Tavener’s health problems and chronic pain. These issues remained with him for the rest of his life and were clearly visible in his work through the strong presence of themes of consolation and beauty in death. In 1990, he was diagnosed with the rare Marfan syndrome.

His spiritual exploration continued over the course of the next decade. Inspired by the Reverend Mother Tekla Famiglietti’s short book The Life of St. Mary of Egypt (1974), Tavener contacted the author, with whom he formed a fruitful relationship over two decades. She acted as his personal theologian and spiritual advisor, particularly after his mother’s death. She also helped him return to writing, a period during which he composed The Protecting Veil (1988) and wrote libretti for several of his pieces, among which are his second opera, Mary of Egypt (1992), and his best-known work, Song for Athene, which mixes texts from Orthodox funerary liturgy with passages from Hamlet. Song for Athene was played at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997.

In 2000, the Southbank Centre in London dedicated a three-week festival to Tavener entitled Ikons of Light. He then became interested in other religions, as well as perennialism, a philosophical and spiritual perspective that considers that all religious traditions share one truth or a single metaphysical origin — on this point, he often referred to Karlheinz Stockhausen. During this period, Tavener wrote Lament for Jerusalem (2002), a mystical love song inspired by the traditions of Abrahamic religions, Shunya (2003), inspired by Buddhism, and The Beautiful Names (2004), about certain Koranic verses, all while studying Sufi poets. This religious universalism was counter to the divisive atmosphere of the beginning of the twenty-first century and provoked a polemical reception.

Despite serious heart problems in 2007, Tavener continued to compose pieces filled with the perspective of his own death, such as Towards Silence (2007). He died on 12 November 2013.

Awards and Distinctions

• Ivor Novello Classical Music Award, 2005
• Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition, 2003
• Chevalier of the New Year Honours list for services to music, 2000
• Prix international Rainier de Monaco for Cain and Abel (1965)