Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

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!’