A superb new score by the illustrious Kaija Saariaho is also played, sometimes between stanzas, sometimes underneath the words, by the four musicians of The Knights (violin, viola, cello, harp). Varied effects of vibrato, portamento and pizzicato bring different shades of intensity, atmosphere, eloquence: Even a single austere cello line down a few tones can become fraught with significance.

But the choreography is vividly independent from the music. Especially in solos, the 10 dancers (including Ms. Tanowitz herself, making a brief but telling appearance) illustrate Eliot’s haunting line “You are the music While the music lasts.” They are, that is, their own music — and their phraseology embodies many of music’s dimensions. Here is dance with its own evocative panoply of melodies, rhythms, harmonies, dynamics, constructions.

The scenic designs by Clifton Taylor uses four paintings by the artist Brice Marden, employing both bright and soft colors, in some of the finest stage imagery of our time. The way one follows another helps to make this “Four Quartets” a spiritual journey. We’re taken, poetically, through planes of existence. Some of the décors include doorways and screens without being intrusive. And the lighting, also by Mr. Taylor, makes the space and performers even more thrilling, sometimes with effects of shadow and silhouette.

Ms. Tanowitz’s use of stage space is superbly varied. Her performers often move like characters aware they’re in a landscape. They move multi-directionally. When dancers occupy only rear corners of the stage — as happens in a long, remarkable duet (that often consists of overlapping or alternating solos) for Jason Collins and Victor Lozano at the start of the second quartet, “East Coker” — they remain the protagonists of their own stories, intensely occupied in their own activities. Yet peripheral space also comes imaginatively into play at many moments: In brief arcs from one wing to the next, people make fleeting entrances and exits, as if anonymous, conveying that this one domain is part of others.