John Tavener's choral work Eonia ("Eternal") was composed in 1989 as a tribute to the composer's close friend, the painter Cecil Collins, "and to his fragile, beautiful, and iconographical art." The work's musical resources are accordingly spare and fragile, leaving the cryptic fragments that comprise its text to breathe with semantic possibilities.

The work was composed for a choral music seminar held at University College in Cork, Ireland. The sacred and reverent nature contrast drastically with one early performance in London. As the composer recalls: "It was in a Church in the city. The score is marked 'With unearthly stillness,' and the choir sang it very, very quietly. But outside the church, all the way through, there was an Irish drunk singing his head off." Regardless, the work became one of Tavener's most popular choral pieces.

The work's conception is itself rather cryptic. The composer was taking a break from his work on Mary of Egypt-a large-scale work for soloists, choirs, orchestra, and tape-when he found himself reading from the verses of the Greek poet George Seferis (1900-1971). He came across Eonia, a "'haiku' or 'fragrance'" whose poignant simplicity so struck him that he immediately phoned Mother Thekla, a close friend whom he had met several years earlier upon setting to music her edition and translation of The Great Canon of St. Andrew. Mother Thekla's reaction to the poem was ambiguously sagely: she improvised a trope on the little verse, in English and Slavonic, which drew from biblical and liturgical themes. The result was a series of poetic icons-almost hieroglyphs-which lent themselves perfectly to Tavener's humble and profound musical economy, and which hinted at the divine mystery and spiritual introspection that dominate Tavener's oeuvre.

The work sets Seferis' text, four short and messianically symbolic lines on the purity of the Jasmine, with a simple musical gesture that moves from a tonic chord to an elaborated dominant at the end of each line. This gesture is rich in allusions and symbolisms, as Geoffrey Hayden points out in Glimpses of Paradise, his life-and-works look at the composer. Hayden identifies the chords as borrowed from the opening of "The Departure of the Guests" from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite. The two chords from Tchaikovsky were quoted by Stravinsky in Petrushka. In a more personal vein, the Nutcracker was counted by Tavener's first wife, the dancer Victoria Maragopoulou, as one of her favorite ballets. Perhaps even more significant-given the dedication of Eonia to the composer's deceased friend-was the instance when, during a stay in the hospital before her death, the composer's mother awakened during a TV broadcast of the ballet. Upon hearing "The Departure of the Guests," his ailing mother sighed, "How beautiful."

It is this repeated musical idea, along with Seferis' short poem, that bookends Eonia. The first iteration of the Jasmine poem in Greek is followed by two lines in English from Mother Thekla: "He asked for bread and we gave Him a stone... /Do whatsoever He bids you." These lines are underscored by the sustained last chord of the previous section. The center of the work is the liturgically triplicate, chant-like iteration of "Gospodi pomilui" ("Lord have mercy"), followed by a reference from Mother Thekla to Jesus' conversation with the thief on the cross, in which he promises to dine that same day in Paradise with him. The original music and Seferis' poem then return, their symbolisms more fully elucidated, with the final dominant chord hanging and fading, unresolved, in the air.

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