In the end, after giving more thought to the question of how to reveal Grieg’s essential dilemma, Jonas decided to set the key scene in Karlsbad, now Karlovy Vary, in the west of the Czech Republic, the famous spa where Grieg stayed, on doctor’s orders, on several occasions, the first of these in the summer of 1881. There was one snag, however: the budget wasn’t looking too healthy. There was no way they could go to Karlovy Vary. It was at this point that Jonas had the idea of looking around Oslo, to see if they could find a building, or even just a room, which would present some semblance of Karlsbad, or at any rate some aspect of Karlsbad; and it was while conducting this search that he was fortunate enough to come across the majestic, almost rocklike, old building on Bankplassen, which happened to be standing empty right then: the Bank of Norway having moved into its superb new premises next door – a jewel in Norway’s crown, if I may say so, and well worth the controversial price paid for it – and the work of converting the old building into the Museum of Contemporary Art not yet begun. All the pieces fell into place. As it happens, this also supported one of Jonas Wergeland’s theories: you can find any place in the world in Norway if you look hard enough.
The programme opened with some stills of Karlsbad in its heyday in the nineteenth century: exteriors of the fine buildings along the banks of the River Teplá, of the Mill Colonnade and a couple of hotels, and of the most famous spring, the Strudel, shooting geyser-like over thirty feet into the air; then the camera panned across a façade of roughly hewn stone before passing through massive and imposing bronze doors flanked by lions’ heads and into a magnificent entrance hall, and no one, absolutely no one suspected that this too was not an authentic shot from Karlsbad, from one of the luxurious sanatoriums which were still in operation.
The year, then, is 1881. Grieg is thirty-eight years old and seriously run down. For some time he has had to conduct and give concerts in order to make ends meet. He has had no chance to concentrate on what he wants to do more than anything else: to compose. Not only that, but his marriage is in difficulties. All of which leaves him, as he himself writes in a letter, with ‘chronic gastritis, enlarged intestines, a swollen liver and the devil knows what else besides’. Add to this that he has only one good lung. Edvard Grieg is not just in Karlsbad, he is also at a crucial turning-point in his life. What will he do now? Although of course it’s easy to guess what he does: he drinks the curative mineral waters, takes different types of bath, follows a strict diet, is given massages, goes for walks. But what is he thinking?
In the first scene Grieg was seen walking slowly along corridors, past highly-polished walls of different types of stone: inside the Bank of Norway – or rather, inside one of Karlsbad’s elegant sanatoriums, a place of gleaming mirrors and brass, with ornate stucco ceilings and doors and furniture in dark-stained pine with bronze fittings. At one point Grieg, frail looking and bent, as if carrying a load of questions on his back, turned into the vaulted central corridor. Here, at the foot of the labradorite sweep of the main staircase, a large orchestra was entertaining the residents. And the musicians were not playing just anything. No, Jonas had them perform a piece from the Viennese classical repertoire, the thorn in Grieg’s side. And the accompanying shots of the other residents made it excessively clear that they belonged to Europe’s wealthy upper classes, that they were members of German high society, a kind of overblown symphonic culture. One saw Grieg’s despair, his unhappiness, saw how the music tormented him, how it hurt him almost physically, like a painful bout of indigestion. Jonas Wergeland wanted to give viewers the impression that Greig, this little man weighing hardly more than eight stone, was in the Hall of the Mountain King, surrounded by trolls; that he was filled with a constant temptation – embodied by the orchestra – to make a Peer Gynt slash in his eye. Or his ear.
In the next scene, the programme’s hub – in stark contrast to the previous turbulent sequence – Grieg is seen lying in a solitary bathtub in an enormous chamber. In actual fact he was in the very vault of the old Bank of Norway, in the basement, where the bars of gold had once been kept. But to the viewers, this was a room in a sanatorium in Karlsbad – an illusion underpinned by the pillars and the mosaic floor. One saw Grieg inside the Troll Mountain, Grieg held spellbound, imprisoned in Europe, in a health resort, where symphonic music, the musical idiom of German Romanticism, reverberated indoctrinatingly off the stone walls. Grieg lay as if dead, eyes closed, in the bathtub, only one hand moving, rubbing his lucky charm, a frog which he always rubbed when stepping up to the podium, to calm his nerves. Close-ups of his fingers around the frog, a creature of fairy tale, bore witness to Grieg’s fervent desire, or prayer, for change. One could positively feel the pressure to which Jonas Wergeland subjected his hero, how he got Grieg to assume a character other than the usual stereotype.
I don’t know whether you remember it, Professor, that memorable shot: Edvard Grieg up to his neck in water in a room that seems far, far too big, Grieg at the blackest moment in his life, knowing that he only has one good lung when he has need of two. It is several years since he created a work on the so-called grand scale. A few vehement voices had accused him of being totally wanting in compositional technique, of having no mastery of the classical forms. The introductions to a number of ambitious works are just lying there, like torsos. Grieg is afraid that he has lost the power to create music of a true dramatic dimension, that something in him has stagnated; his confidence is at a low ebb; he is worried that he will never be more than a small-town genius.
Grieg lies listlessly in that bathtub – the Japanese loved this scene – encircled by pillars in a vast, vaulted chamber. By editing in a succession of different images, Jonas Wergeland made it clear to the viewer that Grieg was thinking about the vital early inspiration he had received, not least from Rikard Nordraak in Copenhagen. Had he betrayed that vision of writing Norwegian music that was not an imitation of the German romantic style? Grieg lies in a bathtub in a sanatorium, mentally depressed, in two minds. Because although he felt tempted to write symphonies, he was still moved, more strongly than ever in fact, by a desire to explore the musical style of his native land; he had not abandoned the idea of giving expression to the ‘hidden harmonies’ in Norwegian folk music. Grieg lies in the middle of Europe, feeling torn, you might say, between the sonata and the cattle call.
The sound of the swelling orchestral music died away, and the camera cut from the lonesome-looking figure of Grieg in a pressure chamber, to brief shots of scenery, Norwegian scenery, mostly that of the ‘great, melancholy landscape of the west country’, as Grieg himself called it; and viewers heard, faintly at first, then louder and louder, evocative piano music, fragments of pieces which Grieg had already written or would later write, snatches from such gems as ‘The Goat-Boy’, ‘Evening in the Mountains’ and ‘To Spring’, as well as his amazing ‘Chiming Bells’ – a clear demonstration of Grieg’s unique and inimitable talent.
Edvard Grieg lay in a bathtub deep in the heart of Europe, longing for his home; he rubbed the frog as if it were a pipeline to the natural world, or to inspiration from it, and on the screen it actually seemed as if, with the frog, he were rubbing into existence the sounds of mountain streams and birdsong, along with parts of the Norwegian landscape, as he wished to do with harmonies and distinctive modulations in his music. Grieg lay there dreaming of how he could paint with music, depict the countryside, nay, the whole of Norway, with a sound that had never been heard before.
As if to suggest that the longed-for change had taken place, that the bout of mental constipation was at an end, Jonas Wergeland had the passage played at Karlsbad flow into a little concert in which Grieg was seen playing compositions of his own in a lovely room with a domed glass roof and an arched marble colonnade, once the banking hall of the old Bank of Norway: in the programme – so everyone thought – a salon at Karlsbad. And he was not playing pieces in the sonata form, but something that had begun as Norwegian folk music and was now something quite differ
ent, something new. Jonas Wergeland wanted to tell the story of a man who, while he could doubtless have gone on writing monumental works full of pathos and bravura, had rejected this option – not necessarily because he recognized his limitations as a symphonist, but because he realized that his personal style could no longer be pressed into the old moulds. It was within this other area, the exploration of harmonies, that he would be able to develop and – though he did not know it – become a trailblazer for the new musical styles of the next century. Seldom has an inner dilemma been filmed, dramatized, with such verve, and yet very few detected the personal pulse behind it, saw that these excerpts from a life could only have been produced by someone who had once had their own bold and ambitious dreams of working with music.
So there sat Edvard Grieg, in the Bank of Norway’s – which is to say Karlsbad’s – sumptuous salon, playing something strange, hitherto unheard-of, something that had once been Hardanger fiddle tunes. The whole scene was so paradoxical: this magnificent chamber in the heart of Europe, filled with a blasé, conservative audience, and then this shocking, foreign music on a so-called small scale, it was an insult. But at the same time this tableau captured the essence of Grieg: playing Norwegian music in an international setting. The great artistic conflict of his life was actually resolved here, a fact underlined by the light filtering down on the little man at the grand piano. Jonas Wergeland let Grieg anticipate what he would later do in his opus 72, that epoch-making piece for piano inspired by the folk melodies of the Norwegian fiddlers, so simple and so subtle that it was regarded by many as Grieg’s finest work. And the audacious harmonies that poured from the piano were not Norwegian; there was a sound inside him that, to future generations, to audiences, to the viewers, sounded Norwegian. The harmonies were all his own, Griegian; this was his original contribution to musical history – a slice of Norway that did not exist until he created it.
In the barrage of criticism unleashed by his conviction, Jonas Wergeland was accused of having stripped the lives of his celebrated subjects of their greatness, their very coherence. Some even said that he had murdered them. In Grieg’s case, they charged Jonas with having accentuated the ‘small scale’ at the expense of the big works. As one well-known musical expert wrote: ‘The programme on Grieg is valueless, in both senses of the word.’
Jonas Wergeland may have had a presentiment about such future fault-finding, because right from the very start he took a singular delight in knowing that no one, apart from the film crew, knew the mint of values which lay behind the programme on Grieg: which is to say, where the Karlsbad scenes were filmed. It was a pleasure, a feeling he had no wish to share with anyone: to picture Grieg in the vault of the Bank of Norway, where the bars of gold had once been kept, and understand that Grieg represented something similar, a national gold reserve, capital in the form of a creative human being, a man who exploited his talent to the full. That was Norway’s most important resource: the intellectual and artistic values. So it was only right and proper that Grieg’s portrait would one day grace Norway’s 500-kroner notes. Grieg had, Jonas knew, brought home vast sums of money to his native land, not just through his musical works, but also indirectly, in helping to promote Norwegian trade and industry.
And as he sat there playing, not in Karlsbad, but in the banking hall, in what is now the main hall of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Grieg was himself a modern work of art. The sound produced by his daring, innovative harmonies was so extraordinary and so modern that a hundred years on it still defies belief; this was music of the future, a sound which paved the way for such composers as Debussy, Ravel and Delius, as well as Bartók and Stravinsky. The episode on Edvard Grieg was Jonas Wergeland’s personal favourite; it stood for everything in which he believed, everything he hoped for, it was the most honest and open, but at the same time the most enigmatic of them all.
Trio
It is in the spaces in between that things happen. Sometimes I have the urge to stop, linger, by these black holes created at the crossover point between two stories. Though it is my aim to describe all of the significant moments in Jonas Wergeland’s life, I cannot rid myself of the suspicion that the really crucial stories, or keys, lie hidden here.
Judge for yourself, Professor, as I turn now to the episode in which Jonas Wergeland is in the car, on his way home from Hvaler, where he has been getting the house ready for the summer. It is the middle of the day, and traffic is light; Jonas is driving a black Ford Sierra estate, heading north on the E6 at a good speed. His head is buzzing with ideas for new projects, something with a Nordic slant, something entertaining, but intelligent which will beat everything ever shown on TV before into a cocked hat. At another level his thoughts are just drifting, as always when he is driving.
How does one become a murderer?
The radio was on, some arts programme, something about literature; he wasn’t really listening, he wasn’t interested in books. He did prick up his ears, however, when someone or other started talking about Axel Stranger’s new novel in rather high-flown but flattering, terms. The way it was presented, the book’s subject matter sounded, to Jonas, like sheer lunacy, but to the speaker on the radio it was ‘that blend of modernism and dark eroticism which has become Axel Stranger’s trademark’. Jonas could not help smiling. He found it impossible to think of Axel as a writer. Axel was a friend. Jonas didn’t know how he would have managed without him the year before, during the distressing public debate sparked off by Veronika Røed’s full-frontal attack, in her newspaper, on his television series. Jonas recalled with gratitude all the conferences, all those keen discussions, at home in the Villa Wergeland: Axel, Margrete and him – an unbeatable trio.
He had reached the top of a gentle dip, one of those miles-long, dead-straight stretches of motorway just north of Moss. A couple of hundred yards ahead of him was a trailer-truck. No cars in front of them or behind them. Suddenly he noticed something odd. The opposite lane was also completely empty, apart from a trailer-truck at the other end of the straight stretch, this too with a car about two hundred yards behind it. Jonas realized that he and ‘his’ truck would pass the other two vehicles pretty much at the very bottom of the dip. The symmetry of this intrigued him, though he did not know why; he watched as they slowly closed on one another. There was something magical, almost awe-inspiring, about the balance that was at all times maintained. To his surprise he saw that the oncoming car, the one behind the trailer-truck, was also a Ford Sierra estate, a white one, a fact which made him even more keyed-up, as if he understood that something was about to happen, that such a correspondence was too weird, too perfect – like yin and yang – to be a coincidence. And as the two cars neared one another, Margrete came into his mind, possibly prompted by Axel’s name, since both were bookworms, ready at the drop of the hat to put their heads together in long, intimate conversations; and yet there was something deeper, more ominous, which had nudged her to the forefront of his thoughts, something associated with these four vehicles, two travelling in either direction, something to do with a dangerous symmetry, or rather: a symmetry close to breaking point, a niggling suspicion; and he had no idea why he should have thought of this right now, but he was thinking about it right now, about her anarchic, not to say destructive, impulses, like the time when she had smashed one of her father’s, the ambassador’s, valuable Chinese vases, one with a blue dragon spiralling around it – on purpose, Jonas believed; she just sort of elbowed it, quite casually, and said ‘Oops!’ – an incident which had left him with the worry that she might one day do something similar to him, since promises, morals, apparently did not mean the same to her as they did to other people; and without knowing why, and even though he tried to concentrate on his driving, he found himself connecting that memory with her tendency to lie, possibly inspired by the novels she read, lie for no reason whatsoever, and not only to him, but to everybody, as if this lent her an air of mystery. Or maybe simply because it amused her: to see whether she could manage t
o keep track of the web of lies she spun around herself; there was something about all of this, Jonas feared, that he had not taken seriously enough, that he had underestimated, just as he had underestimated the situation in which he now found himself on the motorway, in a car, driving at high speed.
The two trucks passed one another, and Jonas knew he ought to have taken note of what it said on the sides of them: a slogan or sign, the name of the company, as if knowing what they carried would have given him some kind of warning; on the other hand he already knew something was up, even before the twinge in his balls, before the white Ford in the opposite lane, which was sitting a couple of hundred yards behind the trailer-truck, shattered the mirror image and veered across the white line into his lane, then came racing towards him at sixty miles per hour. It all happened so quickly, of course – banally so – but for Jonas each tenth of a second seemed like minutes – as I say: it is in the spaces in between that things happen – he had plenty of time to think about all sorts of things: from the time, as a boy, when he used to amuse himself by smashing toy cars into one another head-on, to something that had happened only the other day, when he had been searching through Margrete’s pocket for the garage key and found a strange key, a Trio key – for some unknown reason his first thought was that this was the key to her secret, that there was danger here. And in the second or two that it took his subconscious, working at lightning speed, to convert years of driving experience into muscle action in feet and arms, Jonas had all the time in the world to reflect on such things as where Buddha might be right now, or consider the car radio on which Axel’s name was being mentioned again, which in turn reminded him that he often wondered how Margrete could know so much about Axel: not just about his books, which came to her inscribed with highly personal dedications, and in which she totally engrossed herself, but about where he was, what he was doing, and at the same time there was a different light, a new colour almost, in her eyes, even the smell of her had changed, it reminded him of how she smelled during their first happy years together; she actually walked differently, briskly, with more of a spring in her step; and meanwhile, at an even deeper level, he was frantically trying to recall what sort of lock Axel had on his door – all these reflections were flying around inside his head as the two cars, two identical cars, one black and one white, sped towards one another; all these thoughts, and chaotic though they were, nonetheless they formed a whole of sorts, an explosive conviction that the symmetry had been broken, that it had been broken for a long time, that something did not fit; a puck was skimming towards a fragile construction, only this time he was the puck.
The Conqueror Page 39