‘My mind was wearing away': what it feels like to take on the ultra-marathon of music

Telegraph

23-03-2025

Next month, one of classical music's rarest monsters will be heard on the stage of London's Southbank Centre: Erik Satie's Vexations. The famed pianist Igor Levit will play this extraordinary piece, which can last anything from 12 to 20 hours, depending on whether the musician canters through at speed or, more commonly, at a reverent slow tread. (On past form, the German will clock in at the 'quicker' end.)
There is no work stranger and more extreme, nor more threadbare and apparently simple. It consists of just one page of music: we hear a strange, gaunt little melody, accompanied by ­disconcertingly ambiguous chords, which stops rather than actually ending. Then – as if that weren't austere enough – we hear the bass line of those chords again, followed by the same hollow-eyed procession of harmonies with the notes swapped round, then the bass again.
That is the sum total of the musical material of Vexations. And yet this bowl of extremely thin gruel has become one of the cornerstones of cutting-edge music. For playing the piece once, as above, isn't sufficient. On the manuscript, Satie wrote in his exquisite hand that 'in order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities'. That note has been taken, from the outset, as an instruction to repeat the piece 839 times.
Levit will almost certainly follow suit. Yet notice the wording: Satie does not say 'this piece must be played 840 times'. He only says that anyone who wishes to play the piece 840 times has to be spiritually prepared. Given his reputation as a joker, it's surprising more people haven't wondered whether this is a typical piece of Satie mischief. One imagines him in some musical heaven, still dressed in his signature banker's suit and bowler hat, tittering at our gullibility.
After all, this is the man who once co-authored pieces he labelled 'musique d'ameublement', or 'furniture music'; such stuff was designed to be ignored, and at the first performance, Satie ran around advising the bewildered audience to keep talking and not to listen too hard. He once wrote a set of three pieces called Desiccated Embryos, which portray various species of crustacean: one piece quotes ­ Chopin 's Funeral March, which is described in the score as 'a famous mazurka by Schubert'. And Satie loved to pepper his scores with silly performance directions, such as 'play like a nightingale with toothache', 'don't eat too much' and 'with great kindness'.
But, no. Rather than take Vex­ations as a joke, posterity's judgment has been to take it very seriously indeed. On the strength of this tiny-yet-huge piece, Satie has been hailed as a spiritual godfather by all those experimentalists who placed a bomb under classical music in the mid-20th century. The best known of them is John Cage, who liked to quote Satie's dictum that 'boredom is mysterious and profound' – and went on to compose enormously long, aimless pieces himself, devised with the aid of chance procedures such as tossing a die. He wasn't the only one. The young artist Joseph Beuys loved Satie, as did Andy Warhol.
So, what is Vexations all about? The most straightforward answer is that when Satie composed the piece in 1893, he was indeed vexed, and needed to get something out of his system. The cause of his upset was the painter Suzanne Valadon, who had started life as a circus artist and turned to painting after an injury.
Valadon had become a denizen of the Montmartre café scene in Paris, hanging out with and often posing for the great artists of the day, such as Puvis de Chavannes and Toulouse-Lautrec. It was probably over a glass of absinthe in
Le Chat Noir that she met Satie, who in the early 1890s was struggling to establish himself as a composer. He had already achieved some small fame with his Gymnopédies, piano pieces that had caught the attention of two more successful composers, Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy. They acknowledged their debt to his graceful 'Grecian' melodies – but with a note of condescension that the insecure Satie surely noticed.
By the time he met Valadon, Satie was leading a strange double life. By night, he was a cabaret pianist, making the six-mile journey to Montmartre on foot from his austere single room in the south of Paris, stopping often for a forti­fying glass of absinthe along the way. By day, he was a composer of strangely austere music, some of which sounds quite close to Vexations. At this point, Satie was in his ­'mystical' phase, composing music for a peculiar form of Rosicrucian ritual led by one of Paris's many occultists, while setting up as the pope of a rival 'church' of his own.
The relationship between the eccentric Satie and the fiery Vala­don was over in six months. It's fairly clear that this break-up was the inspiration for Vexations, as the harmonies are identical to those contained in a musical 'greeting' sent to Valadon by Satie. Most men would mark a break-up with sardonic humour, or anger, or desolation. Satie, true to form, marked it with a piece that seems to leave all human feeling behind.
But that doesn't mean it's empty. For a composition so seemingly thin, Vexations is rich in cultural reso­nances. The alternation of harmony and bass line reminds us of church music, and the ingenious construction from the scantest material is 'minimalist' before the term was invented. However, the actual inspiration behind the repetition of almost-identical harmonies may have been the clever-clever poetry – in one style, almost every word in two lines would rhyme – dreamt up by the cabaret poets with whom Satie drank.
Lurking under the troubling, almost aimless ­harmonies is an extraordinarily strict compositional method. Almost all the chords are of just one type, and they're disposed in a way that foreshadows the 'mathematised' music of the next century. In short, this exiguous little piece is remarkably full under the surface. But can it sustain 840 repetitions? And isn't that an endurance test that would tax most performers beyond their limit?
One common solution to the endurance problem is to perform the piece with a team of pianists, each of whom plays for one or two hours before handing over to the next. While one pianist edges gently off the piano stool, the next slides ­gently on, picking up those chords without an audible break. This was the method used by Cage when he organised the first ever public performance of Vexations, at the Pocket Theater in New York City in September 1963. Among the pianists were experimental musicians such as David Tudor and Christian Wolff, but there was also Joshua Rifkin, who later became famous for popularising the ragtime composer Scott Joplin, and The New York Times critic Howard Klein, who was roped in to play.
Wolff recalled that at first the style of playing varied from 'the most sober and cautious to the wilful and effusive'. But after a while, 'the more expansive players began to subside, the more restrained to relax... the music simply took over. At first a kind of passive object, it became the guiding force. As the night wore on, we got weary, or rather just sleepy, and the beautiful state of suspension of self now became risky.'
Stephen Montague, a London-based American composer and pianist, is a grizzled veteran of Vexations, having taken part in four or possibly five performances in the past 50 years. (It's symptomatic that he can't quite remember whether it's four or five. Vexations defeats memory at every level. Even after playing this little piece hundreds of times, pianists can forget how it goes.)
'The first half-hour is easy,' Montague says, 'but after that it's a massive challenge to keep one's concentration. It's so easy to forget whether you've just played the bass line or the first harmonisation, so you don't know what comes next. The piece is so simple, but it's actually very tricky to hold in your mind, so you rely on muscle memory – and that's always a disaster because it sends the mind to sleep.'
Does he try to make his contribution sound individual in some way? 'No, I try to fit with the overall mood, which is what I think most pianists do, but the interesting thing is that each performer does sound a little different to the one before. Maybe adding something a little individual each time round is the only way to stay sane.'
That's the 'team' method. But what about those heroic or poss­ibly foolhardy souls who decide to perform the entire piece solo? The pianist Peter Evans tried in 1970 and wished he hadn't. He gave up after the 595th repetition, as he felt his mind was 'wearing away. I had to stop. If I hadn't stopped, I'd be a very different person today. People who play Vexations do so at their own peril.'
Levit, who'll begin playing on the morning of April 24, is clearly made of sterner stuff. He knows he can pass the endurance test, having done a live-streamed ­performance of Vexations from his studio ­during ­lockdown. In fact, if anything, he ­actually seems to enjoy playing the piece. In 2020, before embarking on the pandemic recital, he declared that 'the sheer ­duration... doesn't feel like a nuisance or ­torture to me, as the title would suggest, but rather a retreat of silence and humility, reflecting a feeling of resistance'.
Perhaps next month's concerts really will be a sublime experience, for Levit and his audience. But I can't help suspecting that Satie's ghost will be laughing behind one raised hand.
Igor Levit performs Vexations at the Southbank Centre, London SE1, (southbankcentre.co.uk) on April 24