The Protecting Veil began as a small favor. Cellist Steven Isserlis asked John Tavener for a short piece, roughly ten minutes, that he could play; what Tavener produced instead grew into a continuous forty-five-minute work in eight sections once the BBC picked it up as a commission for the 1989 Proms season, a considerably larger undertaking than either Isserlis or, by most accounts, Tavener himself had originally envisioned when the conversation started.
Tavener built the piece entirely around the cello's highest register for long stretches, an unusual choice that pushes the instrument into a vocal, almost soprano-like range for much of the work, and structured its eight continuous sections around episodes from the life of the Virgin Mary, using the eight modes of Byzantine chant as an organizing framework, one mode per section, a direct application of his study of Orthodox liturgical music following his 1977 conversion to Orthodox Christianity.
The premiere took place on September 4, 1989, at the Royal Albert Hall in London, with Isserlis as soloist and the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Oliver Knussen, and the work was, by most contemporary accounts, an immediate audience success, an unusual outcome for a new, overtly religious orchestral premiere at a major summer festival more commonly associated with established repertoire.