Later still, Jonas was to learn that something else had occurred on that day when Rakel and his father met Albert Schweitzer in Trinity Church. Perhaps it was because the celebrated guest saw the look of appreciation on Haakon Hansen’s face – or discerned something else there – that he asked Jonas’s father if he would also play something. The latter had hesitated. Haakon Hansen was not known for showing off. Whenever Jonas was with his father and people asked what he did for a living, Haakon always replied: ‘I’m an organ-grinder.’ But the others persuaded him to play. So Haakon sat down at the fine old organ. He also played Bach, a trio sonata. Albert Schweitzer was thrilled, he spent a long time talking to Jonas’s father afterwards, about their mutual passion for organ playing, the architectonics of the music and, of course, the works of the cantor of St Thomas’s Church in Leipzig. Albert Schweitzer was particularly flattered to learn that Haakon Hansen had read his book on Bach, all 800 pages of it – this seemed to please him more than having won the Peace Prize – and he laughed heartily when the Grorud organist made so bold as to say: ‘I think it’s even better than your book on the mysticism of Paul the Apostle.’ Their conversation was so lively and went on for so long that it put the rest of the day’s schedule behind time. Schweitzer’s entourage more or less had to tear him away from Haakon Hansen, in the middle of a discussion about the incomparable timbre of Cavaillé-Coll’s organ in Saint Sulpice in Paris. ‘And wouldn’t you agree,’ Albert Schweitzer called back finally over his shoulder as he was dragged away, ‘that people play Bach too fast these days?’
Only a few years later, Jonas met another organist who had been present at this meeting and who told Jonas that Schweitzer had been full of praise for Haakon Hansen. ‘You are a world-class organist,’ he had told Jonas’s father. ‘What are you doing tucked away in a small church in a Norwegian suburb?’ And it was at that point that Haakon had made the legendary remark – one which was to become a comforting motto in Norwegian organ circles: ‘We all have our own Lambaréné.’
These fragments of a story conflicted with the hints their father himself had given the family about his early years. This new information seemed to speak of a possible career which was never pursued, of a light hidden under a bushel. ‘People still talk about his debut concert,’ one old organist told Jonas. His father had been on the threshold of a dazzling career as a musician when suddenly, for reasons that were never explained, he gave it all up in favour of a humble post as a church organist.
Was this a sacrifice of some sort, or simply a move prompted by shyness, a shyness which Jonas felt he must have inherited? Had his father’s choice of career been a waste of talent – or had this decision actually been the saving of him? Perhaps it had to do with finding a balance in life. Between ambition and reality. Between conscience and opportunity. Whichever way Jonas looked at it, he had to admit – especially when he saw the pleasure his father took in keeping a kayak on an even keel – that Haakon Hansen appeared to be a harmonious, not to say contented individual.
Jonas played ‘Love divine all love excelling’, all but dancing over the organ bench, balancing on his backside while his fingers flew over the manuals and his feet heeled and toed it over the pedals. Now he, too, could see the woman in orange. She took the last few steps up to the dais in front of the altar on which the coffin sat, to his father who lay there dead. In his Lambaréné. A Schweitzer to the people of Grorud. Jonas could not believe his eyes. A woman in orange. Like a member of another religion, another culture, he thought. And behind that thought another, of which he only caught the tail end: or someone from another dimension. A world beyond this one, running parallel to it. Once, when Jonas was small, his father had lifted him onto his lap and played a D major triad, D-F major-A, and explained to him that a piano did not have the capacity to bring out the almost imperceptible difference between an F major and a G flat the way a good violinist could. ‘There’s a blind spot there, between F major and G flat,’ his father told him. As usual that was all he said, but Jonas could finish it for himself: it was the same with life. Maybe this woman hailed from just such a spot. One that lay between the F major and G flat of life. For a moment, a few tenths of a second which also grew in depth like a complex chord, it occurred to Jonas that he might actually owe his life to this woman; that here, in the gossip mirror attached to the side of the organ, he beheld the root cause of his existence. She stood quite still before his father’s coffin, as if she were alone in the church. The hymn came to an end. Jonas laid his hands on the console and drew his feet back to rest under the bench, observing, as he did so, how the woman turned ever so slightly, for a second, and met his mother’s eye, saw her give an almost imperceptible little nod, saw his mother do the same. Then: the unknown woman went down on her knees. At that same moment a ripple of movement passed through the two angels in the painting on the wall behind the altar. Jonas could have sworn to it, did not think anyone had noticed but him. A stirring of their wings. And the coffin hovered. For a few seconds it hovered in mid-air.
Not until years later, did Jonas realise that it was at that moment that he came up with the idea – in a flash, you might say – for his programme on Henrik Ibsen, one of the twenty-odd episodes of Thinking Big, a splendid television series in which each individual programme was as carefully arranged in relation to the others as the pipes in an organ. When that time came, he could not have said where he had got it from – he called it inspiration – but the image stemmed, of course, from this incident: with a woman kneeling in a church. And a possible miracle.
Jonas Wergeland’s programme on Henrik Ibsen did not touch on the less sympathetic sides of the writer’s character: his arrogance and pomposity, his ruthless ambition and, at the same time, his pathological shyness, his pedantry and penchant for the formalities, not to mention all the shameless arse-licking he did in order to obtain honours, his infatuations with very young girls, his drinking, his sexual inhibitions. Nonetheless: seldom has a programme been so roundly condemned. Ibsen researchers and other members of the literati were particularly outraged, describing it as libellous. Because Wergeland’s story about Norway’s national bard – a fictional drama in the spirit of Brand and Peer Gynt – dealt with a man on his knees, a man who, in the course of a few minutes, underwent a total transformation.
The key scene opened with Ibsen – in Rome on business – sitting disconsolately outside an osteria in the magnificent Piazza Navona, drinking wine. He was turning over several projects in his mind, but it was the text of Brand which was giving him the most trouble. He was getting nowhere. Like Duke Skule in The Pretenders he was beginning to have doubts about himself, about his calling. He was afraid that the disparity between the absolute demands and the realities of the situation, between his aims and his abilities, was too great. He sipped his white wine, gazing at the fountain in the centre of the square, at Bernini’s evocative figures and the water splashing into the basin, the four jets meant to symbolise the world’s four great rivers and, hence, the four corners of the globe; tumbling water, a cascade which – as it was presented on television – reminded him of the waterfalls at home in Norway, the wild landscape of western Norway, the darkness of the water, dangerous forces, the magical powers of the water nixie, the risk of drowning: thoughts which moved him to drink more white wine, get even drunker. And in Jonas Wergeland’s rendering it was here, while looking at this fountain, that Ibsen conceived his ‘A verse’ – not printed until years later – which was recited as the screen darkened: ‘To live is – to do battle with trolls / in the vaults of the heart and the mind. / To write is – to sit in judgement on oneself.’
Henrik Ibsen got to his feet, a mite unsteadily, and wove off into the shadows as the sound of bubbling water intensified. The next shot showed the writer standing in a massive doorway, the next again in some dark place, a cave – a studio set conjured into existence by NRK’s best carpenters and designers. To the viewers it looked as though Ibsen had stepped inside his own brain or the
vaults of his heart, and truly did have to do battle in there with trolls and dwarfs. They saw the writer being hunted, tormented, saw Ibsen’s innermost worries swarming around him in the form of ghosts: ‘You’re not Knud Ibsen’s son!’ snorted a gnome. ‘Why do you deny me?’ asked a father. Elves danced around Ibsen, chanting that he was bankrupt, bankrupt. A girl waved a poem at him, crying that he had broken their engagement; a policeman appeared to arrest him and take him off to do hard labour at Akershus Fort. ‘You have lost your faith in God,’ hissed a troll. The most distinct and most oft-recurring figures were, however, a woman and her son, a child whom one understood to be Ibsen’s own, the boy he had, at the age of eighteen, fathered on a serving maid in Grimstad ten years his senior. Henrik Ibsen sat in judgement on himself. His face bore the marks of pride and a passionate will, and of guilt, shame, pain and sorrow. His lips moved. Jonas Wergeland inserted a quote from Brand, the play on which Ibsen was then working: ‘O, endless the atonement here. – / In such confused and tangled state, the thousand twisted strands of fate’, and ended with Brand’s cry at the end of the third act: ‘Give me light!’
And as Henrik Ibsen raised his head, the whole scene opened out. In a stunning dissolve, Jonas Wergeland had the surroundings change from the hall of the Mountain King to the interior of a church, St Peter’s Basilica itself. Through Ibsen’s eyes one gazed straight up at Michelangelo’s breathtakingly high dome. A ray of light streamed down on him, and to viewers at home it seemed that the light alone brought the writer to his knees.
Jonas Wergeland held this shot for a long time, an eternity in viewers’ memories: Henrik Ibsen, the greatest of all Norwegian writers, on his knees under that vast dome, that prodigiously ambitious span, on his knees before the papal altar, under Bernini’s bronze canopy, right next to the steps leading down to the tomb of St Peter, the rock on which the whole Christian church was founded, while all around him the light grew stronger and stronger. It was a provocative image, an image which, for many, accorded badly with the Ibsen they knew: a stubborn, antagonistic character who could not write unless bristling with resentment. But to Jonas Wergeland, this was where all of Ibsen’s future masterpieces had their beginnings: with him kneeling, humbly, under a cupola, in a church.
According to the programme’s version of events, Henrik Ibsen was, at this point, a disheartened man, plagued by thoughts of betrayal in his life and his art; a man who, in sitting in judgement on himself, was bound to find himself guilty. But on his knees under the dome of St Peter’s, under the image of the Almighty himself, he met with compassion, or rather: he was granted – like a gift for which he had not asked – forgiveness; he was set free. Brand was in all ways a reflection of this experience. Just as Ibsen had sacrificed a woman, Else Sophie from Grimstad, and the child he had with her, so too Brand sacrificed, ruthlessly, tragically, his wife and his son, and yet Ibsen concludes the play with a last line proclaiming: ‘He is deus caritatis!’ He is the God of love.
In St Peter’s, Ibsen found a light, a relief and a release which also rendered him receptive to the inspiration and, hence, the creativity which great art can bestow. The barbarians came to Ancient Rome and were civilised. So, too with Henrik Ibsen. Brand – the new, revised, visionary play, that is – was in many ways a response to the works of art in St Peter’s. Most of all to the dome. Michelangelo’s mighty vault gave Ibsen courage, the courage to give his imagination wing. To go out on a limb. The courage to go against the accepted taste, the courage to do something crazy. To say: On the contrary. All or nothing. The works of art in that church, and everywhere else in Rome, did not merely provide him with a new yardstick, they also prompted him to ask himself another question: what is a man. It was here, in St Peter’s Basilica, that Ibsen made up his mind to be a person who asked questions rather than one who answered them. It was here that he began to perceive the possibility of depicting people as no one before him had done.
Through Ibsen’s eyes, television viewers saw him discover the key to his future works. Looking up, he caught sight of the four large mosaic medallions at the four corners of the dome: the four evangelists, four writers, each of whom had presented his version of one man’s life. Ibsen may also have been reminded of the four rivers represented in Bernini’s fountain on the Piazza Navona. He had a vision: he was standing at the intersection point of four powerful spotlight beams, could feel their influence flowing through him, his mind could run in four directions at once. And at that very moment – so Jonas Wergeland postulated – it came to him, the idea of writing four different versions, four stories about the same man, only he would give him four different names: Skule, whom he had already portrayed, Brand, Peer and Julian. Four characters. And yet one. Presenting, when seen together, a picture of Mankind, its depth and its breadth.
Beneath that boundary-breaking cupola in Rome, Henrik Ibsen was liberated from his stunted self. He was free to become someone else, also as a writer. Henrik Ibsen had been transformed. He had blundered into St Peter’s as a troll, enough in himself, and walked out a man.
Jonas Wergeland was, as it happens, firmly convinced that Ibsen’s latterly so renowned sphinx-like countenance, his aloof demeanour was a mask he assumed to save revealing anything of his Caritas moment.
A number of people have pointed out that this programme rests on a somewhat objectionable assumption: that Ibsen died and was restored to life, became a new man. Became more than he had been. What people did not know was that Jonas had made this assumption on the basis of personal experience. In one discussion he did, however, claim that in Peer Gynt Ibsen himself had hinted at something similar. In several scenes, Peer appears to die, and yet goes on living – on the high moors, in the hall of the Mountain King, in the Asylum, on the boat home. As for Henrik Ibsen, from that summer on, more than one person observed a sudden and marked difference in his manner. He became more impulsive, for a long time he read nothing but the Bible and he changed his whole style of dress. This new sense of freedom boosted his self-confidence. The following year, in his ambitious application for a poet’s pension he wrote – in a hand which had also undergone an abrupt transformation – the words which Jonas Wergeland used as the title of his television series: Ibsen would, as he said, fight ‘to arouse the Nation and encourage it to think big’.
Jonas Wergeland, still merely an announcer with NRK television, sat in a church, at an organ, and he too saw a light of sorts: a woman clad in brilliant orange, on her knees before his father’s coffin. The final strains of ‘Love divine all love excelling’ still hung in the air. Jonas did not know whether this occurrence, the woman down by the altar, was going to bring everything to a halt, make time stand still, but he got ready, anyway, to play the postlude while the coffin was carried out to the hearse which waited to take it to the crematorium. Time went on. The strange woman got to her feet and met the eyes trained on her from the packed pews. The precious stones in her earrings flashed. What an amazing figure, Jonas thought to himself. In her orange coat, in such a gathering, she looked like a butterfly on a winter’s day, a peacock butterfly caught in a snowstorm. A creature who lifted the lid off this funeral scene to reveal that it was all about something else, something more. No one knew – no one ever discovered – who she was or why she did it. Whether she belonged to a past time or, as Jonas was inclined to believe, to a parallel time. As she walked – no, strode – up the aisle she seemed, wordlessly, to be saying: ‘You are wrong, this is not a church, it is a palace; that is not an organist in that coffin, but a king.’
Then she was gone. A glowing ember leaving behind it only ashes, dead and black.
Jonas, however, was left with the feeling that she had lit a spark within him. Or that she had blown more life into the tiny flame which he had become aware of earlier when his eye lighted on the nape of Margrete’s neck. He focused on his music, prepared to play the postlude, which was in fact a prelude. The same piece that his father had been playing when he died, Bach’s prelude in A minor. As if pic
king up where his father had left off. A triumph. Jonas raised his hands and, as he did so, in a flash he saw how the most disparate threads of life intertwined in this room, at this moment; how seemingly parallel, unconnected events suddenly came together to form harmonies, music, a prelude which showed him that his own life had not even begun yet. Did it always take a death to render complex matters simple?
Jonas played the first few bars, with the A note held as a pedal point, like a prolonged insistence on new beginnings, on life. Jonas threw himself into this work which, strictly speaking, he was in no way qualified to play, but which he managed to play nonetheless, played it so that the whole church shook. And the longer he played, the greater became the feeling of something of colossal importance welling up inside him, something which had long lain buried, and as he neared the end of the piece, as he caught himself holding his breath, one thought outweighed all others, the thought of taking his talent seriously, because he had the opposite problem from Ibsen: he had the ability, but he lacked the will. Jonas made the air vibrate with his playing, and perhaps because he had long since been imbued with the geometric beauty of this moment, and because the music felt like a crystalline net in which every fragment reflected all of the others, and because he was sitting in a small church, building a cathedral out of music, he found that he had already made up his mind: he longed to have more wind in his sails. He would approach his bosses at NRK and ask to be allowed to make programmes. And some day – again he was reminded of those metro stations in Moscow – some day he might create a series presenting the bright spots, the underground stations, in the collective life of Norway, a series of programmes which would encourage the whole nation to think big. Maybe, the thought struck him as the echo of the final chord died away and a hush fell in the church, such a series could even be regarded as life-saving.
The Discoverer Page 7