Last night I went to a concert of John Tavener's music at the Bridgewater. For four years in the mid 1980s I had composition lessons with Tavener, getting the metropolitan Line to Wembley Park every other Wednesday and walking up the hill to the bland suburban road in which he then lived. There was always a Rolls Royce parked in the drive (his family had money).
At the time Tavener was about forty, but seemed much older. He'd had a minor stroke not long previously, and walked as he spoke, slowly and stiffly. Almost invariably dressed in loose white clothes, as if a small part of Greece had come to Wembley, he wore his thinning sun-bleached hair long. I never worked out how much of his florid complexion was attributable to sun-worship and how much to high blood pressure.
To call my fortnightly visits lessons would be misleading. Sometimes I'd bring pieces I'd written, but only once can I remember his suggesting an alteration. Construing the term teacher narrowly, he wasn't much use; but this was probably my fault. I always thought that I could work out the details for myself, and that what I needed from him was the bigger picture. I know now that this was a mistake, but Tavener was happy to go along with my young man's overconfidence.
Our conversations ranged widely, but returned again and again to women, religion and aesthetics. Tavener's first marriage had come to an end, and his current relationship was running into difficulties. He was extremely reluctant to have children, fearing that fatherhood would interfere with his writing. There were matters which it would perhaps be unfair to air here, but issues of responsibility and commitment would occupy us for hours at a time. I like to think the fact that John does now have children might be to a very small degree attributable to my having urged
this on him.
Although not entirely without vanity and worldliness, the aura of spirituality associated with Tavener seemed to me genuine. He once told me he'd seen the devil (as I remember, outside his bathroom window), and although this seemed unlikely for a variety of reasons, his sincerity was convincing. Apart from a bitter dislike of Catholicism, he was without any of the doctrinaire stupidity often associated with the enthusiastically religious. In our discussions I took the part of the agnostic, and found him perfectly willing to accept that some aspects of belief are hard to swallow. I remember asking the hoary old question: why if God loves us is there so much suffering in the world? "I don't know", he replied. "Perhaps the most we can say is that it is a mystery. And that if we are to believe in God then we have to have faith, and believe even though there are some things about the world we can't understand." There are plenty of glib answers to this question, but Tavener's at least had the merit of some humility.
Aesthetically we seemed on the face of it worlds apart. Tavener's attitude to composition was informed by the austere formality of the Orthodox icons decorating his house, and for him art had been going downhill since the Renaissance. I once bemoaned the absence of conflict in his music. "Conflict's been done", he said. In a way this is true; but conflict hasn't done with us, and every generation needs to find new ways of dealing with it. Nevertheless there was a parallel between the simplicity of Tavener's best music and the Quaker aesthetic of my family background which I find satisfying and inspiring. If I learned anything from Tavener it was to avoid unnecessary complexity.
John was dismissive of peers who failed to heed this maxim. Once he'd been at a dinner at which the American composer Gunther Schuller was also present. A guest had enthused about Tavener's music, remarking how many people were drawn to it. Schuller complained that no-one wanted to hear his own music. John told me, "I felt like saying, What d'you expect when it's such a fucking racket?"
By the end of my second year I'd got to know Tavener reasonably well, and felt emboldened to ask him round to dinner at the two-room flat I shared in Notting Hill with my girlfriend. The custom of bringing some drink to such events seemed to have passed Tavener by, and the solitary bottle of white we'd laid in was soon finished. Fortunately there was an off-licence next door, and I nipped out to buy another with some foreboding in view of John's much vaunted drinking prowess and our relative poverty. I needn't have worried. Shortly afterwards he began to exhibit tell-tale signs, and well before the second bottle was finished he slipped sideways off his chair onto the floor. To be fair, it wasn't the most stable of chairs.
"I must come again sometime", he said, getting unsteadily into the taxi at the end of the evening. I've no doubt that if I'd asked him he'd have come; but that wasn't good enough for me. I wanted him to make an effort too, to demonstrate that my liking for him was reciprocated. But the dinner invitation wasn't returned, and feeling that the limits of our relationship had been neatly illustrated I didn't repeat the offer. At this time I had still over a year left at Trinity, and I didn't like him any less for this minor snub.
In some ways Tavener was extremely kind to me. His end of year reports were glowing, he recommended me to his publisher, and in particular he supported me wholeheartedly in a dispute I had with the college.
Extraordinarily, there was no provision for composition students to have their music performed at Trinity: we were left to our own devices. Looking back, the College should have been ashamed to take our tuition money, because a few performances are worth any amount of lessons; at the time we took the situation more or less for granted. I had a lot of chamber music played by friends, but putting on anything more substantial was impossible. In 1987 I wrote an orchestral piece which came third in the (national) Yehudi Menhuin competition. Feeling this achievement was due some sort of recognition, I attempted to persuade the College to put its resources behind a performance. The attempt eventually ended up on the desk of the principal, Meredith Davies. Tavener wrote a supportive letter, but Davies was dismissive. He returned Tavener's letter with a note scribbled at the foot. It was felt I had "already done very well out of" my time at Trinity. There could be no performance. Tavener commented, "The man's a shit. He doesn't even have the courtesy to write back."
When I left Trinity in July 1988 it was with no expectation that I should stop seeing Tavener; he still owed me a lot of lessons for one thing. "You must still come and see me", he said. However in the autumn I began to find him elusive. He had for some time been contemplating an affair with a girl very much younger, and I wonder now whether he thought I'd disapprove (they subsequently married). I rang him once and she answered the phone. "I'll go and see if he's in", she said. Tavener's house wasn't enormous, and the idea that a search would be required was absurd. "He's not here", she said, returning. This didn't seem very likely, but I left a message asking him to call me.
Whilst I'd been his pupil, taking the initiative to contact Tavener hadn't seemed onerous. Now in a matter of weeks everything had changed. I wasn't his student any longer, and the only possible relationship left to us was friendship. I didn't find his failure to call me back particularly surprising, but it wasn't the stuff of which friendship is made. Although The Protecting Veil was still a few years away, John was already a well-known composer, and although I liked him, my interest must have been exaggerated by the reflected glory of his acquaintance. The reverse was also probably true: although I think he liked me too, I was only his pupil, a person he got paid for seeing for a couple of hours every fortnight. I could have repeated my phone calls, and perhaps I'd have got through in the end, but what would it have been worth, and what would have been the point?
I was surprised to find that the piece I enjoyed most last night was In Alium, a very characteristic late 60s collage in which a high soprano fought to be audible over multiple pre-recorded versions of herself, with crashing interruptions of organ and piano. For my taste, the rest of it flirted too proximately with religious kitsch. And it was all so static.
But it was impossible not to be moved when the old boy shuffled up on stage at the end to take his bow. In the foyer afterwards loomed two tall girls who could only be his daughters. My wife said I should wait for him and say hello. But I said, He still owes me dinner. How daft is that?
