‘The Whale’: an opera that The Beatles brought to the masses
Recorded in 1966, John Tavener’s epic cantata The Whale was an epic telling of the biblical tale of Jonah and the Whale, split into eight sections: I. Documentary, II. Melodrama and Pantomime, III. Invocation. IV. The Storm, V. The Swallowing, VI. The Prayer. VII. In the Belly, and VIII. The Vomiting. It was a regal production with a pop background provided by John Lennon.
The project premiered at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1968 when the composer was just 24 years old. It was innovative and original, receiving rave reviews and airplay from BBC Radio. But its encyclopaedic descriptions of whale facts seemed slightly too left-field for a record label to take a chance on.
That was until Tavener met John Lennon and Yoko Ono at a dinner party and swapped tapes with the couple, and traded ideas about new music. Tavener then met Ringo Starr at his brother Rodger’s house in what proved to be a second stroke of luck.
At the time, Rodger was running the family’s building firm and happened to be renovating Ringo’s Highgate home. In preparation for the meeting, Rodger bought caviar for Ringo, who wanted no fuss or fanfare – just a jam sandwich. It was there that they agreed to re-record The Whale and Tavener’s follow-up, Celtic Requiem.
On the Beatles website, Tavener said Ringo came to all the rehearsals of both The Whale and Celtic Requiem’s recordings. “Indeed, Ringo is one of those shouting through a loud hailer in ‘Melodrama & Pantomime’ on The Whale,” he said, adding that Lennon and Starr were “very important” to him.
The pair acted as his sponsors at Apple Records, and Tavener was thrilled The Beatles label was so supportive of his early work. “It was marvellously refreshing because serious music at that time was very humourless and narrow, and if recorded at all, therefore tended to be on very obscure labels. To have Apple take on The Whale and Celtic Requiem was wonderful.”
The Whale remains an iconoclastic feat for Tavener, who’d previously only covered biblical texts like Credo and Cain and Abel. In his own words, the composition was “interspersed with a surrealist section with the opening encyclopaedic entry on whales. These occurred throughout the biblical narrative of The Whale, at the stomach and inside the belly of the whale”.
Tavener dedicated the piece to his Irish adopted godmother, Lady Birley, and received critical acclaim for it. Before his death in 2013, he was knighted for his services to music, won an Ivor Novello Award, as well as being granted an Honorary Fellowship to Sarum College.
Both The Whale and Celtic Requiem remain one of the boldest acquisitions for a mainstream label in the early ’70s, with Andy Davis calling the “two of the most extraordinary records ever issued, certainly on Apple Records, and most likely on any mainstream label”.
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