In 2016 Stefano Gervasoni proposed De Tinieblas to IRCAM and the project was to write modern Leçons de Ténèbres for choir and electronics. His idea was to pick up the tradition of the Leçons de Ténèbres from the French Baroque (François Couperin, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Michel-Richard de Lalande), just as the late Renaissance composers (John Sheppard, Thomas Tallis, Tomás Luis de Victoria, Giovanni Pierluigi Palestrina, Orlando di Lasso, Carlo Gesualdo, and others) had picked up the tradition.

For his composition, Stefano Gervasoni didn't want to set to music the Lamentations of Jeremiah about the destruction of Jerusalem, as they are the basis of baroque Tenebrae Responsories and Leçons de Tenebres, but rather a contemporary poem cycle by José Ángel Valente (1929-2000): Tres lecciones de tinieblas is its name, dating from 1980, and it is a prose poem that is almost music itself, departing structurally from François Couperin's Leçons de Ténèbres and combining Christian and Kabbalistic Jewish traditions with contemporary imagery.

He wrote this composition between the end of 2019 and April 2020, during the dark time of closure forced upon the world by the outbreak of COVID-19. The premiere of De Tinieblas was repeatedly postponed due to the further waves of this pandemic, and it took another two years for this dream of a "passage through darkness" to become reality.