Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

And so, as they were walking through the arcade behind the Cathedral, Axel Stranger asked whether any examples of the ‘music of the spheres’ had ever been written down.

‘Yes,’ one young man replied promptly, a young man who, for the sake of simplicity, I will call Thomas. ‘Beethoven’s string quartet, opus 131. The fourth movement especially. He leaves the earthly plane behind altogether there.’

‘You must be joking! Beethoven writes music as if his fingers were made of lead!’ came the swift response from a girl — Alva, to stick to Christian names. ‘Mozart, that’s who you should listen to. His string quarter in G-minor. You’ll never hear music more heavenly than that.”

‘Oh, come on, you don’t honestly believe that an utterly conventional little squirt like Mozart can be compared to a trailblazer like Beethoven.’ This remark from another girl, let us call her Trine — although I’m sure there are plenty of people, plenty of Norwegians, at any rate, who could make a guess at her surname.

‘That’s like comparing fireworks to a thunderstorm,’ said Axel, giving no indication of whose side he was on.

‘But you’re working from a totally false set of criteria,’ said Alva, wagging an admonitory finger at Trine, ‘why should it be any easier to compose clear, set melodies than impenetrable harmonies?’

Although no one had been leading the way, they were now walking down Skippergata, sending impassioned arguments for and against the two composers echoing around the tall old buildings and courtyards. The street was deserted, not surprisingly, since it was three o’clock in the morning. The Nomads were often wont to discuss music, and the Beethoven versus Mozart question cropped up so often that it might have been one of the key problems of existence.

But what did Jonas think? They had reached the corner of Tollbugata, which they automatically proceeded to walk up, and were just passing the old City tearooms, the lovely turn-of-the-century interior discernible through the windows, when Jonas saw fit to come out with one of the many quotations he carried in his head: ‘I believe our ideas about music are dependent on the extent, or rather: the limits, of our knowledge,’ he said. ‘Take a concept such as “confusion”, or the related term “order”. Now these are not, of course, properties in a material sense but merely things to which the mind that views or experiences them can relate. So one cannot rule out the possibility that someone, someday, might consider Mozart’s music to be confusing, ponderous and brooding, and Beethoven’s to be simple, clear and light.’

Both Alva and Trine sniggered, muttered something under their breath about ‘a load of waffle’ and ‘trust Jonas’, as they walked up the street past the solid walls of the lowering old Central Post Office.

Some people might laugh, and I will not deny that it does sound a bit over-the-top, almost to the point of parody: five young people strolling along an Oslo street in the middle of the night discussing Mozart and Beethoven as if the fate of the world depended on it. Nonetheless, I rather like this phase in Jonas Wergeland’s life, and I do not consider it in any way unreasonable that Jonas himself should have looked back on these years with a great deal of nostalgia.

They called themselves the Nomads. All five were students who had come to know one another at the University, despite being scattered around a wide variety of faculties. Their lowest common denominator was a pair of sturdy shoes with thick rubber soles, plus an inquiring mind far above the average.

At least one night a week they met up at a prearranged spot somewhere in Oslo and wandered this way and that. They had all discovered how productive it could be to carry on a discussion while roaming the city streets, at night at that, as if the combination of motion, night air and the backdrop of the nation’s capital steered their thoughts along exceptionally original lines.

Thus Oslo, however unlikely it may seem, became a city of ideas. For the rest of his days, Jonas Wergeland would associate house-fronts and shop windows, street names and tramlines with the things they discussed there. The square in front of Tostrupgården, for example, was not a spot which Jonas connected with summertime and pavement cafés; he remembered it for the time when Axel and Trine had come to a halt there, right next to the statue of Christian Krohg, and argued for over an hour about who was the more radical: Bakunin or Kropotkin. Slottsparken was fixed in Jonas’s memory as the setting for a heated debate, verging on a squabble, as to who was the more important writer, James Joyce or Franz Kafka, another recurring topic akin to that of Mozart versus Beethoven and just as impossible to resolve. Jonas would always remember Akershus Fort for a stirring nocturnal walk along its walls upon which Alva regaled them with a wonderful description of Bernardo Bertolucci’s film The Conformist , and he never saw the facade of the Freemason’s Lodge on Wessels plass without thinking of Thomas’s passionate and appetizing presentation of the works of the ecclesiastical historian Mircea Eliades.

What Jonas Wergeland liked best about those strolls at night through the city were the sudden mental leaps, the jumps through time and space, the merging of totally unconnected subjects. There were times when their discussion sounded like an organ, with lots of voices, from the reediest flutes to the deep notes of the pedals, strong and weak, and Jonas thought it was beautiful, every bit as beautiful as the music of the spheres. Sometimes he had the feeling that he could set its stops, throw in a remark that would elicit exactly the right heated note, the voice level he had counted on producing. Or with one incisive statement such as ‘Maria Callas is the world’s greatest prima donna’, he could press an invisible ‘Tutti’ button that set them all talking at once, loudly and vociferously.

To Jonas Wergeland, these nocturnal ramblings through Oslo were very special occasions; he tried to remember everything that was said, to take it all in, with all his senses, and hence he also absorbed the scents and the sounds, brushes against walls, trees, the reflection in a window, as they walked and talked — as, for example, during the furious discussion, conducted on the way from Tøyen to Sofienborg, of Delacroix’s enigmatic painting Young Woman Attacked by a Tiger , which had been sparked off by a little reproduction that Trine had stuck into her notebook; or as when, without any transition, and yet possibly quite logically, they launched into a debate so fierce that one would have thought it was a matter of life or death on whether philosophy began with wonder or with desperation, a topic which kept them occupied all the way through Grünerløkka and far up Maridalsveien. Not that they were always so sure of themselves. Alva had had to search for words on the night, standing outside Ullevål Hospital, when she tried to explain to the others why she felt that ‘ Todesfuge ’ by Paul Celan was the finest poem ever written, but for the most part they had no doubts. There was the time, for instance, when Thomas, standing with his back to the station building at Majorstua, had expounded a long and pretty involved theory, punctuated by a lot of convulsive arm-waving, as to why the socialist experiment in Chile was bound to turn out as it did — this being a subject much on all their minds, as was the American statesman Henry Kissinger, who had just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and who, according to Trine, at two in the morning on Bygdøy allé, was the most brilliant intelligent diplomat of the twentieth century with an unrivalled feel for the widespread consequences and patterns of international politics but who, according to Alva, same time, same place, was an amoral, paranoid and conniving sonofabitch of a tarantula hiding behind a hypocritical gloss of realpolitik . There were some mysteries they could not solve, like what Odin had whispered in Balder’s ear before the latter was laid on the funeral pyre, but there were other riddles to which they did find answers — for example that the ‘Rosebud’ of Orson Welles’s film Citizen Kane could not possibly be anything other than William Randolph Hearst’s pet name for his mistress’s clitoris.