Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

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 different, 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.

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.