The Conqueror

Norway’s Gold Reserve

There were a few of the programmes in the Thinking Big series the symbolism of which was known only to Jonas Wergeland. He derived an almost childish pleasure from this: to know that despite all the bouquets and brickbats no one really knew what he had had in mind. These film sequences harboured a secret meaning.

After the episode on Edvard Grieg was shown — a programme that also caused quite a stir in Japan — Jonas Wergeland was much complimented on the fabulous scenes from Karlsbad. People who had been to the old spa town were even moved to ask whether it had been filmed at this or that hotel. Jonas merely smiled and kept his eyes on the ground. Others actually went to Karlsbad because of what they had seen in this programme. To Jonas Wergeland, such responses proved better than anything else just how little it took to hypnotize people — sometimes he felt he could have got away with presenting his programmes as puppet shows.

The film crew had never been near Karlsbad. The sequences showing Edvard Grieg at the spa were shot in the Bank of Norway. Yes, that’s what I said, Professor: the Bank of Norway.

Jonas Wergeland had originally planned to build the programme on Grieg around his Concerto in A Minor, since that had been conceived abroad and thus illustrated perfectly the liberating effect which going out into the world had had on the talents of Norwegian artists. Jonas even made an unofficial reconnaissance trip to Denmark, to Søllerød on Zealand, where Grieg had written the piano part for the concerto, but he changed his mind about this, which is to say: he could milk no original ideas from this first flash of inspiration. There was also something about the predictability and opportunism of this approach which he did not feel happy with.

In the end, after giving more thought to the question of how to reveal Grieg’s essential dilemma, Jonas decided to set the key scene in Karlsbad, now Karlovy Vary, in the west of the Czech Republic, the famous spa where Grieg stayed, on doctor’s orders, on several occasions, the first of these in the summer of 1881. There was one snag, however: the budget wasn’t looking too healthy. There was no way they could go to Karlovy Vary. It was at this point that Jonas had the idea of looking around Oslo, to see if they could find a building, or even just a room, which would present some semblance of Karlsbad, or at any rate some aspect of Karlsbad; and it was while conducting this search that he was fortunate enough to come across the majestic, almost rocklike, old building on Bankplassen, which happened to be standing empty right then: the Bank of Norway having moved into its superb new premises next door — a jewel in Norway’s crown, if I may say so, and well worth the controversial price paid for it — and the work of converting the old building into the Museum of Contemporary Art not yet begun. All the pieces fell into place. As it happens, this also supported one of Jonas Wergeland’s theories: you can find any place in the world in Norway if you look hard enough.

The programme opened with some stills of Karlsbad in its heyday in the nineteenth century: exteriors of the fine buildings along the banks of the River Teplá, of the Mill Colonnade and a couple of hotels, and of the most famous spring, the Strudel, shooting geyser-like over thirty feet into the air; then the camera panned across a façade of roughly hewn stone before passing through massive and imposing bronze doors flanked by lions’ heads and into a magnificent entrance hall, and no one, absolutely no one suspected that this too was not an authentic shot from Karlsbad, from one of the luxurious sanatoriums which were still in operation.

The year, then, is 1881. Grieg is thirty-eight years old and seriously run down. For some time he has had to conduct and give concerts in order to make ends meet. He has had no chance to concentrate on what he wants to do more than anything else: to compose. Not only that, but his marriage is in difficulties. All of which leaves him, as he himself writes in a letter, with ‘chronic gastritis, enlarged intestines, a swollen liver and the devil knows what else besides’. Add to this that he has only one good lung. Edvard Grieg is not just in Karlsbad, he is also at a crucial turning-point in his life. What will he do now? Although of course it’s easy to guess what he does: he drinks the curative mineral waters, takes different types of bath, follows a strict diet, is given massages, goes for walks. But what is he thinking?

In the first scene Grieg was seen walking slowly along corridors, past highly-polished walls of different types of stone: inside the Bank of Norway — or rather, inside one of Karlsbad’s elegant sanatoriums, a place of gleaming mirrors and brass, with ornate stucco ceilings and doors and furniture in dark-stained pine with bronze fittings. At one point Grieg, frail looking and bent, as if carrying a load of questions on his back, turned into the vaulted central corridor. Here, at the foot of the labradorite sweep of the main staircase, a large orchestra was entertaining the residents. And the musicians were not playing just anything. No, Jonas had them perform a piece from the Viennese classical repertoire, the thorn in Grieg’s side. And the accompanying shots of the other residents made it excessively clear that they belonged to Europe’s wealthy upper classes, that they were members of German high society, a kind of overblown symphonic culture. One saw Grieg’s despair, his unhappiness, saw how the music tormented him, how it hurt him almost physically, like a painful bout of indigestion. Jonas Wergeland wanted to give viewers the impression that Greig, this little man weighing hardly more than eight stone, was in the Hall of the Mountain King, surrounded by trolls; that he was filled with a constant temptation — embodied by the orchestra — to make a Peer Gynt slash in his eye. Or his ear.

In the next scene, the programme’s hub — in stark contrast to the previous turbulent sequence — Grieg is seen lying in a solitary bathtub in an enormous chamber. In actual fact he was in the very vault of the old Bank of Norway, in the basement, where the bars of gold had once been kept. But to the viewers, this was a room in a sanatorium in Karlsbad — an illusion underpinned by the pillars and the mosaic floor. One saw Grieg inside the Troll Mountain, Grieg held spellbound, imprisoned in Europe, in a health resort, where symphonic music, the musical idiom of German Romanticism, reverberated indoctrinatingly off the stone walls. Grieg lay as if dead, eyes closed, in the bathtub, only one hand moving, rubbing his lucky charm, a frog which he always rubbed when stepping up to the podium, to calm his nerves. Close-ups of his fingers around the frog, a creature of fairy tale, bore witness to Grieg’s fervent desire, or prayer, for change. One could positively feel the pressure to which Jonas Wergeland subjected his hero, how he got Grieg to assume a character other than the usual stereotype.

I don’t know whether you remember it, Professor, that memorable shot: Edvard Grieg up to his neck in water in a room that seems far, far too big, Grieg at the blackest moment in his life, knowing that he only has one good lung when he has need of two. It is several years since he created a work on the so-called grand scale. A few vehement voices had accused him of being totally wanting in compositional technique, of having no mastery of the classical forms. The introductions to a number of ambitious works are just lying there, like torsos. Grieg is afraid that he has lost the power to create music of a true dramatic dimension, that something in him has stagnated; his confidence is at a low ebb; he is worried that he will never be more than a small-town genius.

Grieg lies listlessly in that bathtub — the Japanese loved this scene — encircled by pillars in a vast, vaulted chamber. By editing in a succession of different images, Jonas Wergeland made it clear to the viewer that Grieg was thinking about the vital early inspiration he had received, not least from Rikard Nordraak in Copenhagen. Had he betrayed that vision of writing Norwegian music that was not an imitation of the German romantic style? Grieg lies in a bathtub in a sanatorium, mentally depressed, in two minds. Because although he felt tempted to write symphonies, he was still moved, more strongly than ever in fact, by a desire to explore the musical style of his native land; he had not abandoned the idea of giving expression to the ‘hidden harmonies’ in Norwegian folk music. Grieg lies in the middle of Europe, feeling torn, you might say, between the sonata and the cattle call.

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.