Have you ever sat through a concert so long that you worried about catching your last train? Or counted more encores than expected, as your legs itched to stretch? For classical music lovers, length is sometimes part of the thrill — or the challenge.

While most symphonic programmes hover around two hours (intermission included), classical music has a long tradition of pushing the boundaries of time and endurance. From Wagnerian marathons to avant-garde epics, some works sprawl across hours, even days, defying modern attention spans and celebrating what musicologist Tim Rutherford-Johnson calls an “aesthetic of superabundance.”

The Long and the Longer

Take Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, a single-evening opera that stretches over four and a half hours, intermissions excluded. Then there’s his Ring Cycle, an epic in four parts clocking in at around 15 hours — often performed across four consecutive nights. For fans and first-timers alike, it’s a true operatic pilgrimage.

But even Wagner begins to look modest next to some of the more extreme entries in classical music’s long-form canon.

The Infinite Repetition of Satie’s Vexations

Few works rival Erik Satie’s Vexations in sheer conceptual boldness. Composed around 1893 and discovered posthumously, the piece is only a few lines long — but the composer famously instructed it be played 840 times in a row.

Depending on the tempo, a full performance takes between 10 and 19 hours. For decades, the work remained more myth than reality until recent performances turned it into a feat of stamina and devotion. Most recently, pianist Igor Levit took on the challenge in collaboration with artist Marina Abramović, performing the piece in its entirety as an endurance-art statement.

Tavener’s Veil of the Temple: Sacred and Sweeping

Not far behind in scope is Sir John Tavener’s mystical The Veil of the Temple, written for voices, strings, brass and percussion. Composed as an overnight vigil performance in London’s Temple Church, the piece stretches to seven hours, weaving spiritual texts from multiple religious traditions. “I thought I couldn’t possibly write seven hours of music,” Tavener once said. “But it just grew and grew and grew.”

Stockhausen’s Licht: Operatic Madness in 29 Hours

And then there’s Karlheinz Stockhausen, the godfather of avant-garde maximalism. His Licht (Light) opera cycle is perhaps the most ambitious work in classical music history. Composed between 1977 and 2003, the seven-opera cycle spans 29 hours and includes moments of high-concept spectacle — like a string quartet performing in four helicopters, or a scene staged with an orchestra arranged to resemble a human face.

Licht is rarely performed in full — only a few fragments have ever been staged — but it remains a symbol of what happens when creative vision and unbounded ambition collide.

Why Go the Distance?

Why do composers stretch music to such epic lengths? Some seek spiritual immersion, as with Tavener. Others, like Satie, lean into repetition as meditation. And still others, like Stockhausen, use scale to reshape how we perceive time, space, and sound.

In a culture of fast content and short attention spans, these works remind us that longform music can still stir, challenge, and reward — even if you need a cushion (and a day off) to get through it.