On the Shattering of Shared Silence

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

You inherit a culture rich with ritual, pedagogy, architecture, instrument-making, and etiquette. You develop the sensibility to be moved by crafted sound. You cultivate patience, even when everything in the world conspires against it. You work to exchange your labor for the chance to experience the numinous with like-minded neighbors.

And instead of listening to the history of recorded music at home for free, or hoovering infinite short-form video tailored to your unique constellation of desires, you shlep to midtown in the rain on a weeknight.

If you’re lucky, the artist raises the stakes again.

Víkingur Ólafsson, in his March piano recital at Carnegie Hall, requested no applause between long works of Bach, Schubert, and Beethoven. He set an absurdly high bar of holding 3,000 people’s attention without any release. Between pieces, his body never quite rested — he just paused in suspension for a moment and began anew.

The tension was high entering the knotty first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 30. Beethoven chops through the thicket to reach his destination, a theme of uneasy beauty:

Víkingur creates a sense of space like no other living pianist. He is synesthetic, and he reports experiencing the key of E as green. (He sported a sage velvet jacket at the show.) There was almost something of dewed grass in the performance, he and Beethoven both alluding to fragility and renewal. Notes and their overtones rang and reverberated through the centuries and the uninterrupted hour.

Plenty of sturm and drang follow in the theme’s variations, each pointing inevitably toward a peaceful recapitulation. After about 80 minutes in shared, focused silence, we started to sense the first shimmers of our pending reentry to the unceasing noises of 57th Street (and of our private minds). But in those final moments, the hall remained as one consciousness distributed among thousands of bodies.

And then, from the first-tier fancy seats, in the second measure of the returned theme, came a familiar sensory shock. The ringer was set to loud of course — the tune went something like this:

As a bonus needle in the eye, after 80 minutes in E, the klaxon rang in E flat.

The crowd groaned. Víkingur remained poised, but he clocked the assault. I felt a silent camaraderie with the people around me, and I willed myself to breathe through the rupture in hopes of rescuing the payoff. After four rings — about 20 seconds — the phone quieted, but our collective moment was shattered.

A tainted ovation started about a minute later.

We’d been mugged. The moment was so fragile, and it needed to be treated with universal care and conscientiousness, and one person out of thousands undermined it.

To no success, I half-heartedly channeled David Foster Wallace’s call to empathy. The culprit was likely elderly and unwitting, negligent but not malicious. I nevertheless felt the urge to scream in anger. But like all screaming, it would’ve been useless.

The encore arrived and Vikingur seemed to want to give us something extra to compensate. He began with an impossibly beautiful aria by Rameau, “The Arts and the Hours.”

The same phone rang out a second time. People were more audibly aggrieved. Even if the first time was an accident, the second was an insult.

When it went off a third time, interrupting Bach, I skipped over rage and felt only sadness.

In the rare moments it all goes right at the concert hall, I feel the hum of the universe and I open to its mysteries. But this concert felt more like a metaphor for our degraded public life. We almost had something nice, only to find ourselves thrown back into the world where a rogue E-flat clangs against our collective, aspirational E major.

A show like this is meant to be an antidote to the phones in the first place. We all got to Carnegie Hall — we paid good money, dressed up nice, narrowed our focus, and channeled the dead. We thought of those European grumps and sentimentalists, and were reminded how they weren’t so different from us after all. The breathing audience, the focused artist, and the long gone composer co-created the impossible, in vivo.

At the end of the encore, Víkingur stood up, hinged at the waist, and pointed at the crowd. With both charm and irritation, he said, “I hope it was Bach calling!”

It was the final inversion of the evening. For it was Vikingur who called out to Bach on our behalf, and it was Bach who had somehow answered.