So, in the end, it was long but not that long. Twelve hours, compared to the 20 hours-plus many of us had been anticipating. The fastest on record? Very possibly. Igor Levit had started Satie’s Vexations just after 10am on Thursday 24 April, and completed repeat number 840 of this niggly little bastard of a phrase around 10.30pm, preventing any kind of mass sleepover at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. No screens were required in the end either – screens that the Guardian had reported were scheduled to appear around the pianist to hide his modesty when the toilet beckoned. (The logistics of this seemed ambitious.) Instead whenever Levit decided it was time for a loo break he simply walked off stage. And in the end there was also no need to get too irritated at Marina Abramovic for her conceptual interventions, as it wasn’t these that spoiled the performance.
What did spoil the performance was something more fundamental. A strange inability to realise that long-durational art requires – as the name suggests – a commitment to length and duration. Racing through a piece as fast as possible – as Levit started to do in the final hours – taking breaks (however short) defeats the object. It may seem crazy to be miffed that we only heard the same 18-note theme for 12 hours, and not longer. But the magic of long durational work only happens if you do it properly. It is only by doing it properly, by allowing the real-time disintegration of the performer, audience and work to take effect, that anything of interest and beauty can take place. Long-durational art is the art of wear and tear, drama and incident emerging through the steady working out of time’s relentless entropic force. Take away length and duration and all you get is a stuck record.
There were, of course, moments. It was fun to watch Levit go through every imaginable permutation of a head encountering a hand – fingers digging into eyes; hand cradling pate; fist thrusting into cheek; digits in ears and mouth. And I enjoyed listening to the music bending and buckling under the pressure of repetition – though in the hands of a virtuoso it didn’t bend and buckle quite as much as hoped. And I enjoyed the jolt of hearing the music drift into the orbit of completely alien composers. A few jabby iterations and there, suddenly, was Shostakovich as bright as day, loud and unpleasant. Or out of nowhere the lines would split and scatter and carve out a Bach fugue. Then came the mistakes. Gorgeous, ghostly additional harmonies. The trace of a fragrance. The spectre of Scriabin, even Messiaen.
Mostly, however, we got broken 20-something Satie: the sound of a crushed, resentful youth, sadistically inflicting on us the pain of his breakup with the painter Suzanne Valadon with every excruciating regurgitation. Toxic musicality. Maybe Jordan Peterson could have fixed him? It was excruciating not really because of the repetition, but because of the deliberate clumsiness of the melodic phrase itself (the musical equivalent of a mangled sentence), the grating nature of the harmonies, the total incapacity of this four-bar phrase – even once threaded together 840 times – to become anything other than itself. This was obdurately anti-durational music: anti-immersive, anti-transcendental. This was not music you could lose yourself within. People were attempting to float off, assuming yogic positions, but the music – nagging away, like a seat-belt alarm – wouldn’t let you. It’s kind of clever – I guess – that someone in the 1890s decided to see if music could do this sort of thing. It’s also kind of sick in the head.
The truth is that Vexations isn’t about the music at all. The music is wallpaper: elevator music, had David Lynch been in charge of elevators. The music recedes. Or more accurately you force it to recede. And once shoved into the background it becomes nothing, an annoying sonic smudge, a dirty old table cloth on which to eat the main meal. And the main meal becomes everything but the music. It’s why it didn’t irritate me the way Abramovic ended up shuffling audience members onto a highly choreographed stage. Yes, initially it was distracting to watch bits of the set on which the piano was resting being dismantled; to have to listen to the soft hiss of loose seating being dragged across the tiled floor. And yes, there was something hateful about the two humourless robotic assistants who policed the stage and removed people who weren’t adequately still.
But the staging was cool – imagine a Robert Wilson-designed mental asylum – as was the giant mirror that projected the entire stage in one massive overhead shot. And as the Abramovic stasi guided people down the steps and onto the stage in slow motion, everyone hobbling along as if they were unwell, audiences ebbing and flowing (you could come and go), the mis-en-scène begun to do strange things to me. It begun to make me think I’d entered the convalescent home in The Magic Mountain, or a Fellini fever dream. Some kind of bardo-ish netherworld anyway.
It was also hard not to get a masochistic kick out of watching Levit’s discomfort. He was hating this. He had been hating every second of it from about 20 minutes in. As any sane person would. And you could chart his growing contempt – the boiling rage – on his face. He would periodically smirk at the score, snort at it, clench his jaws, then smack the wads of completed music down onto the floor, every repeat having been printed out on separate sheets presumably just to rub it in.
And then there came the loo break. And then another. Then another! And the spell would shatter each time. And I started to wander in and out of the auditorium and check my phone, mosey off for a drink, my commitment broken. Levit had forgotten that long-durational work – whose closest ceremonial relatives are of course religious vigils – relies on a form of magical groupthink. To gain something from the experience you have to go all in. And our chief shaman had absconded. The delicate collective hallucination that had been built up had evaporated. And each time a toilet break came, it was like the sound of the school bell: out we ran. And if you find yourself itching to scram in a long-durational piece, something’s really not going right.
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