Eric Whitacre is a superstar in the choral world. The American composer and conductor talks to Jo Litson about The Sacred Veil, written with poet Charles Anthony Silvestri, who lost his wife to ovarian cancer, and how the internationally acclaimed work has helped others grieve.

Eric Whitacre
Eric Whitacre conducting. Photo © Tao Ruspoli and Marie Noorbergen

In 2016, after a visit from his close friend and long-time collaborator, poet Charles Anthony Silvestri, composer Eric Whitacre found a poem sitting on his piano. It was called The Other Side of Eternity.

In 13 luminous lines, Silvestri envisioned the sacred veil between the finite world of the living and the eternal world on the other side – a membrane that grows thin and opens slightly during birth and death,...