Musicians rarely have the privilege of sharing, with audiences or each other, a work as profound and intimate as The Sacred Veil. In twelve movements, composer Eric Whitacre (b. 1970) and poet Charles Anthony “Tony” Silvestri (b. 1965) unflinchingly explore the porous boundary between life and death, leading us through the grief journey of Tony and his wife Julie, who died of ovarian cancer in 2005, two days before her thirty-sixth birthday. The three had enjoyed a close friendship since the early 1990s when Tony and Eric met in a chorus in Los Angeles; the men eventually collaborated on many beloved works, including “Sleep,” “Lux Aurumque,” and “Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine.” But The Sacred Veil, which includes texts by all three, evolved more slowly.
For nearly ten years after Julie died, Tony poured his energy into raising their two young children and teaching history and world religions at Washburn University in Kansas, while continuing to produce lyrics for numerous compositions. Although friends encouraged him to address his loss through writing poetry, he found it too painful. In 2015, however, he was staying at Eric’s home during a trip to Los Angeles to participate in the funeral of his aunt. He had written a poem to read during the service and left a copy on Eric’s piano. By the time Tony returned from the funeral, Eric had already begun a musical setting—a departure from his usual, more deliberate way of composing. From there, they began to consider a multi-movement work to explore the themes of the original poem, which became the first movement of The Sacred Veil. For the two friends, this would mean the slow, painful process of revisiting both the joy and the trauma of Julie’s life and death.
Tony and Julie had met as teachers at a Los Angeles high school (he teaching history, she Latin). As early as their second date, a picnic overlooking the Pacific, Tony experienced the certainty that this person was his home. Following their marriage, they endured six years of the constant disappointments of infertility before Julie finally became pregnant with their first child. That joy turned to fear when doctors discovered malignant cysts near her uterus shortly before she gave birth to their son, Thomas. Julie longed to have another child and asked the surgeons who removed the cysts and affected lymph nodes to spare her reproductive organs if they could, despite the possible risks. Since they detected no malignancy in her ovaries, the doctors complied, and she successfully completed treatments that left her cancer-free and able to give birth to their daughter, Emma. When Emma was two, the cancer returned. This time, despite a radical hysterectomy and chemotherapy, the ovarian cancer metastasized throughout her abdomen and into her bones. Julie fought hard and lived her last year with intensity, courage, and love.
Although Eric began setting the poem that Tony had left on his piano right away, composing the entire work took almost three years. In addition to strictly musical choices, they had to decide which experiences to include, and in what order to address those experiences. They agreed that Julie’s voice belonged in the work, even if it meant that Tony had to face rereading her journals and the blog she wrote during her treatment and last days. In a seamless collaboration, Tony wrote the words for one movement to the meter of a poem that Eric had once written for him as a birthday gift, while Eric created a mirror lyric for a later movement to spare his friend. Such thoughtful care suffuses the entire work, leading us from pain to healing.
When Eric first read Tony’s poem, he sensed the need for the words to become part of our consciousness. He came up with the idea of slowly repeating each phrase three times, moving the music to the next phrase only on the third repetition. As he has written, “I knew that I would repeat texts and phrases three times every time I wanted to meditate on an idea, to ‘formalize’ the poetry and to create a sense of stasis in the music.” The first movement also introduces two themes that reappear throughout. For Tony, those we love have a continuous existence before birth and after death, so the “veil between the worlds,” while real, never completely separates us. Eric uses a steady repetition of middle C to represent the constant presence of the veil. Julie too has a theme—a minor third from C to E flat and back. As the work progresses, the interval of a major or minor third from middle C, up or down, repeatedly crosses the veil.
The next four movements focus on the years before cancer changed their lives. Tony initially portrays himself as bookish and isolated, only to find himself transformed by his relationship with Julie. As they sit by the Pacific, they need only the caressing words, “You feel like home.” Julie’s voice emerges in the fourth movement, in the form of a poem she wrote in little magnetized words on the refrigerator (later transcribed into her journal). In it, she confronts the frustration of her struggle with infertility and her longing for a child. We hear the wonder of childbirth and the tenderness of a parent’s love for a child in the wordless voices and cello in the fifth movement.
Their world splits forever, into before and after, in the sixth movement, which quotes from Julie’s pathology reports, preceded by her doctor’s unsuccessful attempt to soften the blow with “I’m afraid we found something.” Against a nervous piano part like a ticking clock and amid incomprehensible medical terminology in Latin and Greek, one word screams, then whispers, over and over—“metastasis.” After the diagnosis and its terror, there are no words at all, only Julie’s theme, repeated three times, as she starts to pick up the shattered pieces of her life. We again hear her voice from her blog in “Delicious Times,” describing with both wistfulness and amazing gratitude how she and her children cope with the effects of her chemotherapy. Eric wrote the words of the ninth movement, basing the words and music on how Tony earlier describes the start of his love for Julie. Julie’s voice returns in “Dear Friends,” after she has received devastating medical news. The soprano and alto lines rise high above the veil, as if striving to stay among the living, and end in Julie’s anguished plea that her friends not give up on her.
Although “You rise, I fall” appears near the end of this musical journey, Eric and Tony decided to confront the final moments of Julie’s life first after setting Tony’s original poem. The title came to Eric almost immediately to sum up the end of her physical suffering and the start of Tony’s life without her. He recorded the passage from the first movement that set the words “Silent, either in or out of this our fragile, fleeting world,” sent it to Tony, and asked him to write three stanzas in that meter. Surrounded by slow breaths and sighs, the basses and tenors express helplessness in the face of inevitable loss, with the whole choir ending each verse crying out in dissonant chords that collapse into silence. “Child of Wonder” comes at last as a benediction, releasing Julie to the home that lies beyond the sacred veil.
We close with “Let My Love Be Heard,” a work of deep comfort by Jake Runestad (b. 1986), with words by Alfred Noyes (1880-1958). Repeating the title phrase again and again, in lines that rise in pitch and volume, literally offers a way for grief to make love and loss be heard. The music itself can thus begin transforming the grief, but the love remains.
Susan Wladaver-Morgan