The Conqueror

You should have heard that chord

It was not until the end of the sixties that Jonas’s Wergeland’s decision finally ripened, the one for which he had been searching for, dreaming of, impatiently and more or less constantly, ever since that day in the quarry years before: it was within the realms of music that he would become a king, conquer new territory.

Jonas had been playing the piano since the start of second grade and unlike a lot of children he actually enjoyed it. He did not think this had anything to do with his father, with having watched his father’s blissful face bent over the keys for as long as he could remember. It had to be due to a talent, to skills that had been slumbering inside him and which were now, at long last, being awakened. He had also been taking lessons, though with a different teacher from Daniel — both out of an inveterate need to do the very opposite of his brother and out of a sense of premonition. Daniel went to a lady who lived at the top of Bergensveien, while Jonas went in quite the opposite direction, to a teacher who lived on the other side of Trondheimsveien. As their names suggest, these were two widely diverse addresses: almost, so it would prove, like two different continents. Not surprisingly, Daniel chose his piano teacher according to his own, monomaniacal criteria, which were based more on an assessment of her physical attributes than her gifts as a teacher. So while Daniel had a teacher who tickled the hairs on the back of his neck with jutting breasts every time she leaned over him from behind to show him how to play the part over which he had just stumbled — more often than not on purpose — Jonas had a musical cicerone who galvanized his ears with lilting notes. And while for Daniel, right from the start, practice was a chore — his ‘I’ pitted against the piano — exercises were sheer hell, and the pieces themselves pearls cast before swine, Jonas experienced some of the pleasure promised by music books with titles such as The Piano and Me, Exercises are Fun and Pearls from the Baroque.

What sort of sound does a dragon make?

Jonas’s teacher lived in a spacious villa next door to the vicarage, on holy ground you might say, where lessons were overseen, not to say inspired, by ‘the four greats’: Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, whose semi-divine visages looked down from their frames on the living-room wall. If Jonas turned his head he could see the whole of the Grorud Valley spread out before him outside the window, as if the music lifted him up to the heavens, an impression which was reinforced by the smell of the place, since the kitchen always contained some freshly-baked wonder, plump Christmas cakes or plaited loaves, and thus the dances and ballads, marches and rhapsodies gave the illusion of making his mouth water. As a way of rounding off the lesson he would often sit with a fresh slice of coffee ring in his hand, listening while Fru Brøgger, who had the longest, slenderest fingers he had ever seen, demonstrated how Chopin’s ‘Minute Waltz’ really could be played in a minute — a feat so incredible that his ears just about fell off.

Fru Brøgger and her sensitive fingers may have been something of a rarity, who am I to say; at any rate, she was quite liable to interrupt a lesson so that they could watch the birds on the bird table in the garden instead; sometimes they even went out onto the steps to hear them singing, especially in the spring. Her real stroke of genius, however, was that as well as teaching him the obligatory short pieces, she also allowed Jonas to feel his own way into the world of music, making it a kind of game in which he could discover all its different elements: triads, tempo, dynamics or the mystery of major and minor. She allowed him, to use a high-flown word, to improvise. So — my apologies for getting carried away here — God bless the exceptions like Fru Brøgger, and the Devil take all those who kill an inquisitive child’s pleasure in playing the piano by making them slog away at exercises in fingering and legato playing — not that these aren’t necessary at a certain stage, but at other times they act as a total barrier to the art itself, to what music is: timbre, rhythm, melody.

With Fru Brøgger this was how it worked: instead of having to struggle through a saraband by Bach come hell or high water, particularly if she could hear that Jonas had not practised enough, they might play with the cycle of fifths — if, that is, she wasn’t telling him something about harmonics or the demanding nature of the contrapuntal technique. And in due course she introduced Jonas to the liberating world of jazz, with the aid of composer Maj Sønstevold’s little, but extremely stimulating, Jazz ABC. Nor did Fru Brøgger neglect to tell Jonas an anecdote that taught him something important about the love of music and a certain way of looking at life. Briefly told, it was a story about Maj’s husband, Gunnar Sønstevold, also a composer, who had come home one day and told his wife that he had been helping to move a big piano, only it had slipped out of their hands on the bend in the stairs and flown out of the window on the fifth floor. And in describing this incredible incident to Maj: how the piano had hit the ground with a crash, all he said was: ‘You should have heard that chord!’

After all these years with Fru Brøgger, with birds and minute waltzes and fresh-baked coffee ring, it was not surprising that it should be within the field of music that Jonas would spy a potential for conquest, or that he should first consider chords as posing the greatest challenge. It came to a point where he was practising for as much as two hours every day, to the great annoyance of the rest of the family. Buddha, when he appeared on the scene, was the only one who could not get enough of it, especially when it came to chordal improvisations, always crawled over and sat close to the piano when Jonas was playing.

And so it was in that legendary year of revolution, with students all over the Western world seething with unrest, Jonas Wergeland had his — oh, why not: revolutionary — musical vision, and it struck him with such force that he almost fell of his stool. For once he was alone at home, sitting at the piano, running his fingers over the keys when he — or rather: his fingers, his body — suddenly began to produce rhythmic patterns, he tried alternating between the white keys and all the black ones; the resultant effect went straight to his head, he produced increasingly electrifying tones, kept repeating the chords, building them up into a crescendo while continually altering the rhythm; it was amazing, he got more and more carried away, discovered new harmonies, new rhythms, felt his body all but lifting off the piano stool, felt himself becoming hypnotized by what he had created, rhythms that grew more and more frenetic, according with everything going on inside him, the turbulent events of the last few years, not least an upsetting incident that had occurred only a few weeks earlier — we’re getting there, Professor, we’re getting there — one which was in no way eclipsed by the sight of a piano crashing to the ground from a fifth-floor window. He also understood, for the first time, the extract he had copied down earlier from one of the books sitting disregarded in the bookcase — a legacy, a score of old volumes — from the postscript to Hector Berlioz’s memoirs, to be precise, which said that, as Berlioz saw it, music comes down to passionate expression, inner intensity, rhythmical drive and a quality of unexpectedness. All at once Jonas felt strong, full of self-confidence, like a Hector, a hero, a giant.

From then on he gave himself up to composing. He was only fifteen, but pretty well schooled in musical notation. He learned the most complicated passages by heart anyway, if they did not simply stick in his memory after a few playings. That whole year, spring, summer, autumn, he was obsessed with this, he was convinced, in the mind-reeling way one can only be at the age of fifteen, that he was in possession of an explosive idea, something that had never been heard before, nothing less than a brand-new path for music to take, an incredibly bold concept, and one which called, above all, for courage. By God, it would have consequences for the whole concept of what music is, Jonas thought.

He knew it would take time, that it would take him years, but he wanted to proclaim his discovery now, as if he were anxious to take out a patent for this sensational invention as quickly as possible. And so he devised a way of trying out his magnificent vision in a simplified form: a piece for the piano he called ‘Dragon Sacrifice’, to be played on Pupils’ Night, the concert that rounded off the autumn term.

I do not know if the words ‘Pupils’ Night’ make you shudder, Professor, but you can take it from me that such evenings were pure torture, even at Fru Brøgger’s, a kind of purgatory that had to be undergone before one attained the paradisiacal state of the holidays. On such evenings the mums and dads made up the audience, and the bunch of spruced-up children had, as it were, to show their parents that their money had been well spent or, what was far more difficult, that all that fractured pounding on the keys which had disturbed their newspaper reading had actually borne fruit. As I say, most people’s idea of a nightmare.

But not for Jonas Wergeland, or at least not on this December evening, because he was about to give the assembled company a foretaste of his triumph, something which they would recall as a milestone, a work which maybe — he thought, he dreamed — even at this stage would be seen for what it was: a change of course, the cutting of the first sod for a totally new road.

Pupils’ Night arrived. In the one half of Fru Brøgger’s L-shaped living room sat the expectant parents — from Jonas’s family his father, Haakon Hansen — and at the other end, out of sight, the nervous pupils huddled together in panic-stricken solidarity. In the middle, for all to see, stood the grand piano, which was only used on such grand occasions, that in itself a responsibility — one which was further underlined by the fact that the lid was raised, like the sail of a majestic black ship. Fru Brøgger, almost unrecognisable in evening dress, introduced her pupils with a few kind words meant to lighten the mood — to no avail, of course.

The youngest children played first, little more than scales really, to loud applause no matter how often they stumbled. And so it progressed, in ascending order of difficulty rather than age, perhaps. Fru Brøgger was saving Jonas for last, even though she had not heard his piece, he had simply asked if he could play one of his own compositions. ‘It’s better than that blasted Rachmaninoff prelude,’ he declared. A tolerant and in truth rather curious Fru Brøgger yielded to this shameless show of bravado.

It went well; children played études and minuets, some very well, others making ghastly mistakes, one of them even had a total mental block — the one thing everybody dreaded. And then it is Jonas’s turn, the audience know he is good, son of the organist, they have heard him play before, remember the time he played the second movement of the ‘Pathétique’ sonata so beautifully that it brought a lump to the throat, they nod and whisper to one another; Jonas steps out, catches a glimpse of the whole Grorud Valley spread at his feet and glittering like the promise of a reward outside the window, before he bows and people clap; he is a conqueror, he is about to present his new kingdom, he sits down at the grand piano, as if at a gigantic lacquered casket, from whose lid he will call up a dragon. Or — the thought suddenly strikes him — a radio play.

He is trembling with excitement. But also with self-confidence. He feels the approving eyes of ‘the four greats’ on his back.

He strikes the keys. A shock attack. An explosive clang, varied and repeated in unconventional rhythms. He is aware, even though he is concentrating on his playing, of the jolt of surprise that runs through the audience — many of whom he knows. For this is no safe invention by Bach or a nice little sonata by Mozart and most definitely not an old chestnut like the second movement of the ‘Pathétique’ sonata, but Jonas Wergeland’s own bold composition; it is Pupils’ Night and one of the darkest days of the year, aptly enough, since Jonas Wergeland is playing ‘Dragon Sacrifice’ on a black grand piano: an evocation of the battle between weak, waning light and vast darkness. The music has to do with harvest, with people holding a sense-inflaming sacrificial ceremony: Vikings perhaps, pagans who worship the forces of nature; a savage ritual designed to compel the light to return, or to achieve complete and utter darkness, who knows; a ceremony which will grow wilder and wilder. Rhythm is the cornerstone: rhythm and not much else. It is music for a new age. Jonas has created startling, jangling chords that he builds into a variety of rhythmic progressions, at the same time alternating between different tempos. Now and again, particularly towards the end, he plays the same discordant — to the listeners’ ears, that is — tone again and again, at a furious tempo for over a minute, he feels people starting to squirm in their seats, clearly ruffled, or riled, as if this is like torture to them, or a kind of rape. He has also discovered something he calls ‘laughter harmony’, a combination of two different, conflicting chords played high up on the descant, a glorious, devilish dissonance which he slams out at regular intervals, like a spark in the darkness, wanting to give the audience a sensation, through their hearing, of something very, very primitive, something revoltingly immoral, something which is going totally berserk. And yet, as he sits there, conscious with one part of his mind of the gleaming, black surface of the piano, so like the lacquer on his grandfather’s old casket, he is suddenly overwhelmed by the beauty of this barbaric piece of music. With something close to alarm he notices how it becomes more and more beautiful — to his ears, that is — how an inexplicable, ecstatic sense of well-being spreads throughout his body as he hammers out these dissonant chords, producing a sound which borders on the threshold of pain, the whole thing culminating in a crescendo that goes on and on, one which, in his own mental picture of the music, does not stop at one lousy fortissimo but has an ffff written into it; and finally, with both forearms and the pedal, he bangs out a chord that sounds like something huge and heavy, enormous black wings, crashing to the ground — a dragon. It’s marvellous, it’s crazy. It’s brilliant, he thinks to himself. He stands up, bows. He knows what they will say when they get home, or when they tell their friends about it: ‘You should have heard that chord!’

No applause. Utter silence.

Haakon Hansen clears his throat. Claps.

God bless fathers like Haakon Hansen.

Fru Brøgger begins to clap too. Everyone else claps, hesitantly and not for long. Fru Brøgger smiles. A genuine smile. ‘Well, I must say…’ she begins, ‘that really was…’ She has to let her long, slender fingers form the words she cannot find. ‘But now it’s time for a bite to eat,’ she says, because refreshments were always served after the actual concert: smørbrød, incomparable freshly-baked coffee ring, of course, lemonade and coffee, before the evening continued with some informal games, usually including one in which you had to run around finding little pictures of birds and putting names to them.

Jonas walked home with his father, the latter with his arm round his son’s shoulder. Haakon started to say something then stopped and instead gripped Jonas’s shoulder even tighter, gave him a little shake.

God bless fathers like Haakon Hansen. Fathers who could say something, and would be quite right, but do not say anything.

So it was left to Fru Brøgger to bring Jonas back down to earth, or whatever you want to call it. He had one lesson left before Christmas and was looking forward to discussing his composition. When he entered the living room Fru Brøgger was standing with her back to him, watching some great tits hopping about among the bushes in the snow-covered garden — an idyllic Christmas-card scene. ‘Come here,’ she said. ‘Look.’ Jonas positioned himself next to her. Without turning she stroked his back once.

‘I’m not sure I ought to be doing this,’ she said, walking over to a cupboard and taking out a record. ‘But I think it’s for the best. In the long run.’ Jonas watched as those long, slender fingers removed the black record from its sleeve and right away he knew that this was another puck, a black disc that would shatter a dream. She put on the record, turned up the sound. Loud. Jonas listened with pounding heart to the music that poured out of the two loudspeakers at the other end of the room.

He gave a start. He could not believe it. He started because he was hearing his own piece. Not exactly the same, obviously. And the parts that were similar were, of course, a lot better. An awful lot better. But still. His own piece. The concept. They stood and heard it to the end. A torment and a shock. He thought of a puck skimming silently across the ice, appearing out of nowhere, and an exquisite monument crashing down in a cascade of light, shards flying in all directions, a pearl he would never find again.

‘Igor Stravinsky,’ Fru Brøgger said. ‘We haven’t played anything by him yet.’

‘When?’ was all he said, his last hope — a straw — that the answer would be last year, yesterday.

‘Before the First World War,’ she said. ‘Fifty-five years ago.’ She didn’t need to add this last, but she said it, knew she had to say it.

Jonas stood there in the centre of the room with ‘the four greats’ in their frames behind him. He heard a quick laugh. A devilish harmony played high up on the descant. A dragon. Or a chord from a piano crashing to the ground from the fifth floor — he could not say. Someone had had his groundbreaking idea about music half a century ago. For years, someone, a whole world had inhabited that landscape which he had imagined to be deserted. The concept had been perfected, used up, milked of all potential.

He was devastated. He felt — and only a poet’s analogy can capture his state of mind — like a Napoleon crippled in his first battle. In his mind, his whole future had been based on this: that he had the power to create something new. He could always improve upon his technique, but he now knew that he did not possess the one thing that really counted: a capacity for original thought. One could of course say that Jonas Wergeland was not being fair to himself, that one cannot judge one’s life at the age of fifteen, that it is perfectly possible to think along new lines even when one has never done so before — the early works of many great composers weren’t all that impressive either — but for Jonas the impatient, for Jonas Wergeland the perfectionist, this, this composition was his to be or not to be. Fru Brøgger’s revelation confirmed what he had, deep down, feared most of all: he was a mediocrity. The commonest little mongrel, as his uncle had once said. That was his fate. He just knew it. He could postpone it, fight for ten years at least against this knowledge, but the verdict would still be the same: he would always be a charlatan. One who, although he managed to hide it from an audience — other mediocrities — merely imitated the creations of true conquerors. He would have to wrestle with the worst of all fates: to have planted within him a lofty goal, a goal so manifestly right, so enticing that he could never forsake it, but at the same time lack the aptitude to achieve it.

He could not bear to stay there, Fru Brøgger walked him to the door, stroked his back again. Wordlessly she handed him a slice of coffee ring, as if he were a little kid, he thought, a little kid in need of comforting. ‘Give it to the birds,’ he said and was gone.

He had never seen as many great tits as he did on the way home. The males were strung out like infuriating yellow notes along the black lines of the tree branches. The words rang in his head: Great tit! You great tit! He swore that he would never touch a piano again.

It was snowing. On impulse he made for the church, thinking of suicide, thinking that he was on his way to his own funeral.

What cracked so loud? He heard the question sung out all around him? Norway from my hand, he thought.