Programme Note

At the 2025 International Festival, we have commissioned a series of expert essays to help you Dive Deeper into your Festival experience.

This essay on The Veil of The Temple dives into the history of the composition, explores the religious and personal influences behind it, and walks through the eight cycles.

Seeking Spiritual Unity

The Veil of the Temple defies all categorisation. It is not an accompaniment to religious worship, although it does include liturgical and musical quotations from many different faiths. It is not a work of conventional classical music; its eight-hour length and the number of specialised musicians it requires sets it apart from other concert hall repertoire. Neither is it a work of sound art. It is something else entirely.

John Tavener was commissioned in 2000 by the Temple Church in London to write an all-night work, a piece of music that would begin as darkness fell and conclude at dawn. The idea emerged during a tea break while his 1997 composition Eternity's Sunrise was being recorded at the famous Round Church of the Temple. This extraordinary building was erected by the Knights Templar and consecrated in 1240. Its circular design and dome recalls the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, a connection that the composer would weave into this work about the soul's journey from darkness to light. 

Divine Inspiration

Tavener approached writing such a long work thinking about his memories of the long vigils he had attended in Greek churches. In 1977, he had converted to the Orthodox Church, and these marathon liturgical celebrations, during which the congregation could come and go as relentless Byzantine chants rang out hour by hour, served as a major inspiration for The Veil of the Temple. Perhaps the best way to describe this work is as a vigil, a word that is as old as the Temple Church itself and which evokes the kind of devotional watching engendered by both religious observance and Tavener's music. 

By the time The Veil of the Temple premiered in 2003, Tavener had created a rigid structure that could bear the weight of his musical ideas about spiritual enlightenment and pan-religious communion. The work is divided into eight cycles, inspired by the prayer wheels used in Buddhist recitation. Each cycle is in a different, higher key than the last, so that the music has ascended a full octave by the time it reaches the end. 

A Guide to the Cycles

Cycles II through VI start with a ‘Primordial Call’ heralded by sustained notes on a large gong, marking the entry into the new key. Tavener is referencing the Byzantine system of eight tones, each representing a different spiritual state. The first seven cycles all include a soprano solo as well as some material from the Kyrie, the Christian liturgical prayer that sees the believer call upon God to show mercy. Musical themes recur and are developed as the piece continues, culminating in some of its most popular and memorable moments, such as Cycle II: V. Holy Mary and Cycle VII: VII Mother of God. The latter, coming as it does after many hours of musical and emotional build-up, can be a moment of great catharsis for musicians and listeners alike. Its dissonances and suspended chords speak to the tension at the heart of Tavener's great project of spiritual unity.

International Understanding

Tavener's Orthodox faith and his interest in the points of communication between different religions are fundamental to The Veil of the Temple. The work is sung in five languages: English, Aramaic, Church Slavonic, Greek and Sanskrit. It also incorporates harmonic elements from different musical traditions, so that at times we hear simple chorale-style harmonies reminiscent of Johann Sebastian Bach, and at others, melodies and intervals inspired by Sufi, Islamic, Jewish or Buddhist traditions. The words show evidence of similar borrowings. Cycle I opens with a setting for solo soprano of a devotional text by the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic Rumi, and there are verses from the Gospel of St John woven into each of the first seven cycles. Cycle VIII emphasises the removal of the ‘veils’ that separate religions and ideologies from understanding one another.

'A Journey Towards God'

The Veil of the Temple ends in the same way that T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land does, with the repeated Sanskrit word ‘shantih, shantih, shantih’. This is an invocation of peace, especially inner peace. Except the ending of The Veil of the Temple is not particularly peaceful; the words are chanted in an energetic, almost martial way by male voices while the higher parts twine a mysterious countermelody around it. There is no obvious resolution, either; no grand and final chord. The chants of ‘Shantih’ simply fade away, which I have always taken to be Tavener's last word on the human condition — we try for peace, and our trying continues. He once described The Veil of the Temple as ‘a journey towards God’. Its Ancient Greek subtitle, te telos, means ‘end’ but also ‘beginning’. The journey is still in progress. 

© Caroline Crampton 2025