Thursday 4th August 2016

At last the great event. Mercury Mr Kitten arranged personages on the red carpet where Rufus Pitman did a piece to camera for German TV. Cars were drawing up and all three Austrian Presidents were delivered, although not seen by us. Mrs Merkel was also given as present. There was a high red carpet feel – gowns and frocks and wraps and hair and faces such as never seen in the glaring light of everyday walks of life.

But beneath was trembling. It had been released into the ether that the perf would begin before it began and perhaps never end. I said to the the German TV man, ‘You’d better come back later. The audience might be unrecognisable or no longer in existence by 10pm.’

Anthony Mottram and I took our seats. There was something odd about the clatter of pre-performance which was that it wasn’t the clatter of pre-performance. Somebody was doing something deliberately. Then the performers appeared in some of the greatest Dior-esque couture ever seen. They were trapped by why? They could not leave but there was nothing stopping them. Were they dead or being punished for being rich? Or perhaps alive? Perhaps this not being able to leave is just like life, which is hard to leave as every Poor Little Rich Gay knows, as he or she forges on through suffering. The performers got grubby and smelly and their couture frayed. They had various ideas of what to do. Committing, or just plain dying was one of them, but really they gained little in that way, those that took that path. Others thought that were they to kill the owner of the house, then everything would be all right. But they rather forgot about this plan in the end. It was terrible that there were only teaspoons. One performer soared with lyric searing beauty, lamenting the lack of the right kind of spoon. So true: in life the little things are just as big as the big ones, if not bigger. Lourdes was mentioned: they would go there upon release and acquire a washable rubber Virgin Mary. Finally it turned out that they’d got stuck because they’d dropped a stitch further back in their life-knitting as it were. It was a question of finding the place and weaving back to it. Not easy, as knitters will know. But it was done, and the soprano sang her song as she’d failed to do the first time and they all could leave the room, those still alive. But… well, it wasn’t quite as simple as that.

The actual audience were able to leave at what was possibly the end, and brilliance at once poured forth: ‘Oh, yes,’ Kernow Hellizon said, ‘every time I think I have gained freedom, it turns out to be another trap.’

This performance was astonishing and completely new: this is what must be grasped. Nothing like this has ever been attempted before. Such a massive assembly of performers, in the first place – that in itself was remarkable. But then to get them to constantly dissolve and re-form, dissolve and re-form. So daring, such a risk. It could all have been a horrible mess. How to keep the great grandeur of performance, the dynamism and assertion, yet have them shift and fold into one ambiguity after another. So utter greatness and newness.

Unique Greatness: the Audience for the Performance at Salzburg

Normal Street Wear from the Performance

Not Necessarily Alive

Raj Zoraster Leaves the Hotel for the Performance

Rufus Pitman in Austrian National Costume, Leaves the hotel for the Performance