Desperately sad to hear last night of the death of John Tavener. It must be awful for his wife and family. He was only 69.
I wrote a few months ago about my four years of lessons with John, and you can read the post here if you're interested. He was a nice man and a thoroughly distinctive and utterly fearless composer working in a time of conformism masquerading as radicalism.
So now the tributes will come flooding in. I heard one of them last night, an interview with ex-Radio 3 controller Nicholas Kenyon on Front Row. Kenyon said that in the 1980s Tavener had been an unfashionable composer, and that it was heartening to see his reputation growing again. When I heard Kenyon say this I did wonder, Unfashionable with whom?
Tavener's relationship with the BBC was an uneasy one. I remember seeing him literally shaking with anger at a rebuff that one of his favourite sopranos had received. He had overcome the Corporation's reservations about this girl, and persuaded them to allow her to broadcast one of his pieces, but afterwards a producer had written to her to point out that this occasion was a one-off, and that as far as he was concerned she still had not passed her BBC audition.
Tavener was white with anger. I can't remember exactly what he said, but it contained words like "petty", "mean" and "vindictive". And then he said - and I do remember this clearly - "They hate me. They hate me because I'm popular". This while pacing up and down his living room in Wembley Park. "But because I'm popular, they can't ignore me".
The question of what music was for was one we discussed many many times. It was easy for composers like Bach or Haydn who worked for patrons, the church and the aristocracy respectively, but afterwards more difficult. He was sure though that music had to communicate with an audience, and that if it didn't there was probably something wrong with it. At the time - the mid 1980s - this was not a widely held view in the British musical establishment, and it's probably fair to say that an artificial reverence for the recondite and intimidating still lurks in mouldy corners.
Personally I am not a great fan of Tavener's music. As I've written here many times before, it's about the invention, stupid - you either like it or you don't. And I don't, or not that much. I like his attitude to the world and his humility (although like a lot of humble people, John defended his humility with a certain amount of ferocity) more than I like the music which those attitudes inspired. But undoubtedly he was a wildly, extravagantly ambitious composer who wrote music a lot of people loved. That is a very rare thing now, and I'm not sure there's another living British composer who inspires such affection.
The last time I saw Tavener was from row J at the Bridgewater Hall last July. My wife told me to go and say hello, and I wish now I had overcome my scruples. I know he would have been absolutely charming and it would have been good to have said - however unwittingly - goodbye.
