The Protecting Veil

The Protecting Veil began as a small favor. Cellist Steven Isserlis asked John Tavener for a short piece, roughly ten minutes, that he could play; what Tavener produced instead grew into a continuous forty-five-minute work in eight sections once the BBC picked it up as a commission for the 1989 Proms season, a considerably larger undertaking than either Isserlis or, by most accounts, Tavener himself had originally envisioned when the conversation started.

Tavener built the piece entirely around the cello's highest register for long stretches, an unusual choice that pushes the instrument into a vocal, almost soprano-like range for much of the work, and structured its eight continuous sections around episodes from the life of the Virgin Mary, using the eight modes of Byzantine chant as an organizing framework, one mode per section, a direct application of his study of Orthodox liturgical music following his 1977 conversion to Orthodox Christianity.

The premiere took place on September 4, 1989, at the Royal Albert Hall in London, with Isserlis as soloist and the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Oliver Knussen, and the work was, by most contemporary accounts, an immediate audience success, an unusual outcome for a new, overtly religious orchestral premiere at a major summer festival more commonly associated with established repertoire.

The feast that gives Tavener's work its title commemorates a specific reported event: sometime in the early tenth century, at the Blachernae Palace church in Constantinople, worshippers including the visionary Andrew the Fool for Christ reported seeing the Theotokos, the Mother of God, appear above the congregation and spread her veil, her maphorion, over the people gathered there, a gesture Orthodox tradition reads as a sign of her continuing protection over the faithful. The Orthodox Church commemorates the vision annually on October 1 as the Feast of the Protecting Veil, or Pokrov.

Tavener sets no words at all in the piece named for that feast; The Protecting Veil is purely instrumental, cello against strings, which means the connection to the Blachernae vision and to the eight subsequent episodes of Mary's life the piece's eight sections trace has to be carried entirely by the music itself, by the cello's high, sustained, voice-like lines against the surrounding string texture, rather than by any sung or spoken text a listener could follow along with directly.

Tavener himself described his broader compositional aim, across this piece and much of his later religious output, as trying "to make a lyrical icon in sound," treating a musical work the way Orthodox tradition treats a painted icon: not as a literal illustration of an event, but as a devotional object meant to open a window onto something beyond itself, which for The Protecting Veil is specifically the Orthodox veneration of Mary as a continuous, still-active protective presence rather than as a figure confined to a single completed historical episode.