John Tavener

Summary

‘One of the functions of music is to help us to transcend suffering.’

The death of Sir John Tavener in November 2013 was headline news, in a way that the passing of no other contemporary British composer, however eminent and however important his or her contribution to music, would have been. This reflected not only Sir John's originality (and perhaps his personal eccentricity) but also the extraordinary success of his music – he has been described as the most popular British classical composer of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

This perhaps unlikely popularity was one of the things that I wanted to ask him about when I went to talk to him at his home in Dorset just five and a half weeks before his death. And I explained to him that although, as with the other interviews for this book, I would be asking a mixture of ‘standard’ and ‘particular’ questions, in his case there would probably be more of the latter as he was such a singular figure in British music. ‘I suppose I am, yes’, he agreed.

The encounter had been postponed because after returning from a holiday abroad he’d been unwell, and I knew that he was frail and in poor general health. Sure enough, he looked tired and drawn as he welcomed me into his home and showed me to the living room, and the famously plummy voice was weakened and hoarse. His wife was away for the day and he was alone in the house, but after about half an hour a carer let herself in through the front door and made us tea. For the duration of my visit Sir John sat on a sofa, moving only to periodically stretch out at right angles a long, spindly leg (the effort of doing this sometimes made him grimace), and I learned that this was where he spent most of his day, working, reading and thinking in an attempt to distract himself from constant physical pain.

This was not his final interview, because he gave a number of others in the weeks before his death. Plans for celebrations of his seventieth birthday in January 2014 were well advanced, and he was preparing for the first performance of his Three Shakespeare Sonnets in Southwark Cathedral (this took place, as planned, three days after his death). But it was one of the last that he gave.