Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

Jonas was captivated by the opera, the mere fact of being able to sit in that red auditorium, in the dark, and listen to a load of absolute claptrap swathed in bombastic music. To be honest, he liked it so much that he sometimes caught himself shaking his head exactly like some jazz freak, in a combination of incredulity and rapturous glee. It made his toes curl with delight to hear these bedizened characters giving vent in song to their passions and frustrations, particularly on those few occasions when the whole thing was sung in German. He could not get enough of it: the extravagant gestures, all of that totally unnatural set-up, with people dotted about the stage like chess pieces, singing, wailing of their intrigues; those passages in which the most hopelessly sentimental words were poured out with every last ounce of sincerity. Jonas sat there in the dark, wondering what it could be that moved him so deeply, and he came to the conclusion that it had to be a sort of pathos by proxy, that these people on the stage were going over the top for his sake, too, to save him having to do so in his own life. There was something about the artificiality of it all, the utter remoteness from reality that lent an air of fantastic comedy to these overdressed tableaux; the recitatives in particular were priceless. ‘If you feel like an alien on this Earth then do something about it, go to the opera,’ he told Axel. ‘Experience the unreality of society taken to the extreme.’ Jonas sat there in the dark, revelling in it with all his senses. The opera also heavily reinforced his decision to become the Duke, to tell his own story, independent of Norwegian daily life, outside of Norwegian society. Up and down the country people were sitting watching television or reading magazines or doing their homework or tinkering with the car or demonstrating against the USA. Here he sat, Jonas Wergeland, in his rightful surroundings, in a red plush auditorium ringing with ear-splitting song, in the centre of Oslo, in the centre of the nation’s capital and yet so marvellously, liberatingly outside .

Naturally some of the Young Socialists at school got wind of it and spread the word about this appalling example of class betrayal: a Grorud lad at the haute bourgeois Opera House. During one fierce discussion in the schoolyard, in the shed yet again, not all that unlike an outdoor stage, when the Young Socialists asked whether he ought not to be making his points in song, one politically active girl had dared him to give a talk about opera at a meeting of Owl, the Cathedral School debating society, and in the heat of the moment he had agreed. Owl could be described as something of an intellectual sandpit, but it was, even so, a well respected platform, at any rate until the Red Front took over and turned the whole thing, as always, into a hopelessly sectarian business. The most disparate figures had willingly taken part in Owl meetings in their various capacities, people like Reiulf Steen, Nils Christie and Berthold Grünfeldt, as well as a high-flying Einar Forde, who made a passionate speech about draft-dodging as a political statement, and the chief medical officer, Karl Evang, who talked about drugs and caused a furore by handing out samples of various substances. In this forum, Jonas had contemplated giving a talk entitled ‘Opera as Socialism’ — working not from the inherently intriguing fact that the Opera had taken over the old People’s Theatre premises but from the idea that opera, like socialism, wanted to change the real world, while both socialist ideals and opera involved the necessary dash of naivety and pathos.

Jonas was not, however, giving any thought to that right then, sitting as he was in the balcony, in the third row, with Knut Skram on bended knee down on the stage, Knut Skram with whom he had once exchanged a word or two at the Stortorvet Inn while the singer — already a star, in Norway at any rate — was displaying his partiality for smørbrød with cod roe. Now here was that same Knut Skram, kneeling down on the stage, too young to play Don Juan, but wearing a wig that gave him a balding pate, being someone else entirely, singing in Italian, no one would imagine that he had ever eaten smørbrød with cod roe in a Norwegian restaurant. Jonas was giving no thought whatsoever to what he would do at the debating society meeting; he was too busy just savouring the moment.

Even in the foyer, before the performance began, there had been an extra buzz of excitement in the air, possibly because it was just before Christmas. The whole thing reminded Jonas of his first visits to the theatre with the school, the formality of such occasions: the boys showing up with slicked-down hair and bowties, and the girls looking almost unrecognizable, little ladies in their best dresses with a drop of stupefying scent in the hollows of their throats, none of which stopped them from chucking fruit drops at one another and flirting freely and outrageously during the interval, as if that were the real point of a visit to the theatre. And in the midst of it all one could not help but be seduced by the merry-go-round action of the revolving stage and the dreamy blue shimmer of the stage lighting, by something unreal which was nonetheless sheer magic: as if the lie went so far that it bit its own tail and became true.

So, too, with this. Jonas had had the time of his life from the minute the curtain went up to disclose a stairway, a balcony, some arches; simplified forms suggestive of Spanish architecture: in other words even this, even the scenery, was stylized, a clear sign that one had left reality and all need for credibility far behind and should prepare, for instance, to see the Commendatore and Don Giovanni crossing swords in time to the music. Amazing. Jonas had the urge to clap. A fight to the death in time to the music. How they must have had to rehearse that, Jonas thought. He gasped ecstatically when the Commendatore was mortally wounded and lay there singing as he died. Fabulous. Jonas had to restrain himself from shouting ‘bravo!’ The fact that the libretto was in Norwegian made it all the more hilarious. In Don Giovanni the serenade was the only piece sung in Italian. And it was at the very moment when Jonas was most enjoying being able to sit there in that scented atmosphere, watching a bedizened man lying dying on a stage and singing as he did so, that the whole perspective suddenly swung around, like a revolving stage and all of a sudden he realized that this opera, or any opera whatsoever, was not in fact an escape from reality; on the contrary, it held up a mirror to reality. That was the way life was; it was only that so few people had realized it. People fenced in time to the music and sang while they were dying. After this perceptual about-turn, Jonas viewed the rest of Don Giovanni as a masterful facsimile of all the melodramatic and banal aspects of life, with coincidences, masked faces and mistaken identities all the way. So when, only a moment after killing the Commendatore, Don Giovanni tried to seduce Donna Elvira, who for some strange reason he did not recognize, even though he had actually been married to her for a short time, Jonas no longer found any of this odd. Quite the reverse: he applauded this totally unlikely situation as a nigh-on perfect reflection of the society in which he lived with the result that the entire opera was transformed into passages of almost startling beauty. Not only Don Juan’s duet with Zerlina, ‘Give me your hand’, in the scene where he gate-crashes the peasants’ wedding, but also and to as great an extent the farcical, not to say pornographic, sequence in which Zerlina tried to appease her betrothed, Masetto, going down on all fours, wiggling her backside at him and singing ‘Beat me, beat me’ in such a way that even those members of the audience who had become totally, breathlessly, wrapped up in the story — such people do exist! — could not help but laugh.