Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music

when it's out of ice cream.

Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. Hello. The life of Sir John Tavanagh was full of pleasingly earthbound details.

He liked fast cars and sunbathing. His brother, Roger, helped secure his first recording contract

while doing some building work on Ringo Starr's house in Highgate. But Tavona was a composer

who spent his life travelling in the direction of the metaphysical world and his means of

propulsion was often literary. The poetry of Sappho and Anna Akmativa, the fiction of

Tolstoy, the plays of Sophocles. In this program, we're going to examine some of the poems

that fueled his progress towards what he called Holy Minimalism. The actor Peter Marinka

will be reading them for us, and the analytical work will be done by the poet and

librettist Michael Simmons Roberts and the Reverend Richard Coles, our only ordained pop star,

though surely it's only a matter of time for Bono. Michael Simmons Roberts, Tavner had an ambivalent

attitude to all but the deepest musical traditions. He didn't like a great deal of 20th century music.

He thought Bach was overly emotional.

I wonder if that helps explain the amplified importance of poetry in his work.

I think it may do.

He certainly seems to have plundered poetic history wherever he found something he could

use. Poets are always a bit wary about this because there's a music inherent in a poem. So when a

composer gets hold of it, you're always worried whether the music will be just stamped upon by the

music of the composer.

And I think that Tavauna was at times quite merciless with that.

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