In 1893, Erik Satie composed an enigmatic little piano piece titled “Vexations.” At the head of the score, he wrote, “To play this motif eight hundred forty times in a row, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, in the deepest silence, through serious immobilities.” Seventy years later, John Cage decided to take that cryptic instruction literally; he organized a performance at which the piece was, in fact, played eight hundred and forty times, by a rotating team of pianists. Since then, “Vexations” marathons have taken place regularly, around the world. A few brave souls have played the piece solo; the late British-Australian musicologist Richard Toop was the first to accomplish the feat, in 1967.
The brilliant young German pianist Igor Levit, whom I recently profiled in the magazine, responded to the coronavirus shutdown with a marathon feat of his own: beginning on March 12th, he presented fifty-two house concerts—nearly one every night—in his apartment, streaming the results on Twitter. He then took a pause, although he already had another scheme in mind: his own solo rendition of “Vexations,” one that would be tailored to the current moment. It will go on for some twenty hours, beginning at 8 A.M. Eastern time, on May 30th. The Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and Der Spiegel, in Germany, will both carry the feed—and you can watch the performance here at The New Yorker, on the live stream above.
When I called Levit to ask what had possessed him, he took an unexpected mental leap, as he often does. “Do you remember the end of the last ‘Godfather’ movie?,” he asked me. “When Sofia Coppola has been shot, and Al Pacino is on the steps outside the opera? He is screaming, but you can’t hear him. It is a ‘stumme Schrei’—a silent scream. This is the feeling that has often taken hold of me in recent weeks, when I see so many people struggling and so many people suffering. I looked for a way to express that musically, and thought of Satie.”
Levit went on: “I honestly don’t really know what is going to happen. But I believe I will feel, while doing it, kind of similar to what I go through now. There will be ups, there will be downs, there will be devastation, there will joy, there will be literal pain. Just this monotonic repetition of just the same thing, of a piece which in a way has no apparent musical content—just this staring at a wall, waiting, waiting. At some point, you lose the perspective of time—like now. You lose the perspective of an end—like now. I think at some point I will lose the hope that this will ever end—like now. Maybe I won’t make it. It’s just about surviving. Like now.”
