“What do you mean by that, bud?” his friend asks tenderly.

“I think a good death is one where you are at peace with what’s happening to you. You’re not in denial. You’re not trying to fight. There comes a point where you decide it’s time … and you pass. That, I think, is a good death.”

Julie was 35 when she died from ovarian cancer, leaving Tony and two young kids. More than a decade later he showed his old college choir buddy a eulogy he’d written. “Whenever there is birth or death/ The sacred veil between the worlds grows thin and opens slightly up/ Just long enough for Love to slip/ Silent, either in or out of this, our fragile, fleeting world.”

Whitacre heard music in it on first reading. He asked for more. You Rise I Fall came next, then joyful verses about first love and commitment, and more anxious and sombre ones about diagnosis and worse. As the arc of the story emerged in all its beauty and horror, it was decided that Julie’s voice needed to be heard too.

“We had this magnetic thing where you move the words around on the refrigerator,” Silvestri remembers of their early years together. “I have no memory of those messages getting any more profound than just little communications between spouses. And then when I read those poems, especially the one that ended up in the work, I was just blown away.”

The movement titled Magnetic Poetry that Julie had copied into her journal was from the time they were having trouble conceiving. “But the spring life force is so near,” she wrote, as if reaching to her unborn children. It was an act of foreshadowing that would seal the concept in her husband’s mind.

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“It’s immensely personal and very vulnerable,” he says of the work, which received its New York premiere in 2020. “Sometimes I feel like the audience is focused on me, but in a good way, in a kind of supportive way … The first few movements are a joy to listen to, over and over. And then when it turns dark, I remember those days. I conjure it in my mind when the performance goes there.”

The Sacred Veil was co-commissioned by Monash University, the Los Angeles Master Chorale and the Netherlands Radio Choir. Here it will be performed by the 24-voice Trinity College Choir and 16-voice Polyphonic Voices. Elsewhere, much smaller and larger ensembles have taken on the work, always to immense emotional effect, the composers say.

“It becomes an experience, it becomes a liturgy,” Silvestri says. “The audience … they bond with the singers in a different way than any other work. It’s a visceral thing. And it’s not something that you can explain or predict, it just sort of happens.”

Whitacre adds that he was “wholly unprepared for the number of people who actually have experienced cancer, either themselves or somebody directly. It’s staggering to me that that’s a common theme amongst audiences. I never was prepared for that.”

“We’ve all experienced grief in one respect or another,” his friend says. “Yes, this is Julie and my story. But I think because we approached it in such a simple, elemental way, experiencers of the work, participants in its ministry, can latch on their own grief, their own story, and let it have some curative property to them.”

The Sacred Veil will be performed on September 7 and 8 at Alexander Theatre, The Ian Potter Performing Arts Centre. Eric Whitacre will also present a choral workshop on September 6.

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