The Seducer

Pyramid Playing

Jonas Wergeland had originally intended to open the programme on Ole Bull with the central character, in the shape of Normann Vaage, standing by a waterfall, playing one of his hell-for-leather compositions: a nod, so to speak, in the direction of the myth of the Fossgrimen, the fiddle-playing sprite of the falls, and the magic of the fiddlers of old. This sequence would also have fitted in beautifully with a cut to pictures of the green-patinated statue of Ole Bull set amid the fountains in the lovely gardens outside the Hotel Norge in Bergen, after which they could pan up to the peaks of Fløyen and Ulriken and the landscape of western Norway which supposedly meant so much to Ole Bull.

That it did not turn out this way was due not only to Jonas Wergeland’s decision, following one of the basic principles behind the series, to set the key scene in each programme in a foreign location, which meant dispensing with most of the hackneyed images associated with Ole Bull — old Bergen, the family home in Valestrand and, not least, the quite fascinating jumble of a house on the island of Lysøen, a monument to his hectic travels — but also to the fact that at the planning stage Jonas had asked the same question of Ole Bornemann Bull as he asked of all his other chosen subjects: what is the story at the heart of this person’s life? And in Bull’s case, Jonas Wergeland replied as follows: Ole Bull’s story is that of a man who travelled the world over in search of the perfect sounding-board for the Norwegian tone. And this Ole Bull found at the top of the Great Pyramid of Cheops.

Now it could be argued that this scene, too — Ole Bull atop the seventh wonder of the world on his 66th birthday — has been pretty much done to death, but when it came to a choice between this and a scene from Oleana in a small valley in the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania, Jonas opted for Egypt, prompted not only by the fact that this scene could have been made for television but also by another, underlying, motive: the chance of finally getting to see Cairo, one of the few capitals in the world he had not visited. In this respect, Jonas Wergeland falls neatly into line with all the other individuals who have had NRK foot the bill for their own private jaunts abroad.

The greatest challenge was, therefore, to come up with a ploy which would breathe fresh life into the Cheops scene, and this Jonas achieved by alternating vertical shots of the pyramid with a frenetic, panorama sequence which actually constituted the programme’s main leitmotif, depicting Ole Bull travelling the length and breadth of Europe like a sort of musical Casanova in his English-built coach. Thus the programme darted back and forth between a young Ole Bull on his helter-skelter tour of the concert halls of Europe, large and small, and an elderly Ole Bull climbing the Great Pyramid of Cheops. For the scenes of the perpetual progress from one city to the next, from Paris to Trieste, from Cadiz to Riga, Jonas alternated between exterior shots of the coach, with eight fine horses between the traces, and shots of the interior, specially fitted out as a sleeping chamber in which Ole Bull and his manservant could spend the night — all of this filmed on one of the avenues in Frognerparken in Oslo and interspersed with shots from the concerts, where the set — a more or less faithful reproduction built in the studio of the concert hall in Bologna, scene of what was possibly the most important concert of his career — remained the same throughout with various different backdrops representing Florence or St Petersburg simply and quite openly being dropped into place, and Ole Bull always giving a solo performance of the coda, rich in musical pyrotechnics and bravura flourishes, from his own, not particularly well-known, but tempestuous composition ‘Polacca guerriera’ — possibly inspired by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius — thus giving the viewers the impression of a constant repetition of the same elements: the massive coach racing full tilt across the same stretch of country; Bull in his seat, the same impatient expression on his face; the same concert hall, the same audience, the same music, the same ovations, the same ladies weeping, the same gifts, flowers and jewellery, brooches and snuff boxes inlaid with precious stones, then the carriage again, charging on through dust, mud, snow, rain, then the concert hall and so on and so forth, broken only by Bull as an old man, shot in slow motion, negotiating the massive stone blocks of the Great Pyramid, the sound of his breathing and his heartbeat amplified, dominating the soundtrack. It was said of this programme that the shaking of the carriage eventually transmitted itself to the armchairs of the viewers at home and that every time the old man was seen laboriously ascending the pyramid they were on the edge of their seats, almost as if they were watching a thriller as if, even though they knew the outcome, they were not sure whether he really would make it.

The middle segment of the programme was given over to the regular spot in which Jonas Wergeland himself, in modern dress, stepped onto the set to interview the central character. Much of the series’ popularity could be put down to this part of the programme, thanks to Wergeland’s unique television presence and the extremely artful way in which the interview revealed certain less well-known aspects of the hero’s character. Thus, in this programme, Jonas Wergeland sat halfway up the Great Pyramid, talking to a clearly exhausted and exaggeratedly aged Ole Bull — looking like a burnt-out Casanova, to pursue the metaphor — with Bull replying as animatedly and as eloquently as was apparently his wont to the questions Jonas Wergeland put to him regarding his Arabian horses, his attempt to commit suicide by jumping into the Seine, that duel with rapiers — did that really happen? — his weakness for casinos, his affair with opera singer Maria Malibran, his two marriages, and is it true, Ole Bull, that you were offered the post of general with the Spanish army? They then went on to talk about his music, about Torgeir Augundsson, the Lad from Myllar, about the Norwegian airs, their unique character, and, above all, about Ole Bull’s great passion: violins — from his first, a Santo Seraphino, by way of all the others, among them an Amati grand patron, a Stradivarius, a Guarnerius — or was it three? — to the pride of them all which he now cradled in his arms, caressing it as if it were a baby, a Gasparo da Salò with the carved angel head at the top of the neck and the delicate zigzag border on the fingerboard. From this Wergeland switched to asking Ole Bull, halfway up the Great Pyramid of Cheops, how his instruments were constructed, got him to explain how the bridges were made lower and flatter so that he could play all of the strings at once and why he used an especially long, rigid, heavy bow, after which Ole Bull demonstrated his finesse on the violin in a brilliant sequence — with close-ups of a real violinist’s hands, of course — in which the viewers were given a taste of Bull’s matchless polyphonies and inimitable cantabile, his pizzicatos and trills and harmonics, together with a mind-boggling staccato technique which could conjure up 350 notes with one stroke of the bow, before the musician rounded off with imitations of everything from birds twittering to the wind sighing in the tops of the birch trees, from waterfalls to the crackle of lightning.

For his own part, Jonas Wergeland was happiest with the ending — perhaps because they had been the first foreign television crew for many years to be granted permission, without bribing anyone, to film at the top of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, which says much for Jonas Wergeland’s rare gift for seducing people. They had gone so far over the top in this scene that it teetered on the very brink of pure parody. Norman Vaage, clad in a copy of Ole Bull’s concert dress, looked magnificent standing on the top of the pyramid in the sunset next to a fluttering Norwegian flag, overlooking Cairo and the Nile and the desert, playing, or supposedly playing ‘The Saeter Girl’s Sunday’ with such a passionate expression on his face and such theatrical gestures and such power that anyone would have thought he was trying to bring down the Great Pyramid the way the Hebrews had done farther east with the walls of Jericho. The diamonds set in to the tip of the bow, sparkled in the light and the music, that melancholy Norwegian melody, was so irredeemably unctuous, going as far as it decently could without slipping over into an unadulterated gypsy serenade, while Ole Bull, alias Normann Vaage, finished off — or so it seemed to the viewers — by releasing a white dove from the violin case. In addition, the Bedouin extras had been encouraged to act even more awestruck than the story would have it, if that were possible, which is to say that they fell to their knees as if bewitched, exclaiming ‘Allah, Allah!’ In Jonas Wergeland’s version even the camels knelt before him.

Jonas realized, of course, that Ole Bull had to be viewed in the light of the nineteenth-century concert tradition, whereby the performer was very much an improviser, creating the music as he went along; nonetheless Jonas wanted also to leave some room for those critical voices which hold that Ole Bull was more of a buffoon and a conjuror than a musician, not to say composer, of real standing and maintain that Bull had to resort to cheap tricks and bravura displays for want of genuine virtuosity. And here Wergeland was alluding to a particularly Norwegian syndrome: that in Norway one can at best be a virtuoso but never creative and certainly never innovative — as exemplified by Ole Bull, who could have been one of the truly great musicians but who possibly let this opportunity slip by not taking lessons, so that one cannot but agree with Franz Liszt when that temperamental gentleman declared in the midst of a private contretemps that the name of Ole Bull would have been forgotten by Europe when the world was still paying homage to his, Liszt’s, memory. Nevertheless Jonas Wergeland succeeded in highlighting Bull’s greatest gift to the Norwegian people, both in his own day and today: his innate ability to kindle excitement in others. There were many viewers who felt that Ole Bull not only conquered Cheops but also the heart of the Norwegian people. Ole Bull’s was a fine, uplifting story, a fairy tale to his contemporaries, the first and greatest red-letter day of their lives, as Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson — for once — so aptly put it, a Norwegian who played a whole night long in the Colosseum in the moonlight and proved that even an insignificant little country such as Norway could make its mark in the big wide world: a fact which to this very day the nation finds it hard to comprehend, with the result that they have to go to the length of creating advertising campaigns costing millions of kroner, taking out full pages in the newspapers to persuade more Norwegians that they are as good as the rest of the world.

Although Jonas Wergeland had long since become used to the power of television, he could still be surprised by its unforeseen consequences. After the programme on Ole Bull people rushed out in droves to buy the soundtrack from it, which included ‘Polacca guerriera’, the relatively unknown piece by Bull that had run like a deep, irresistible undercurrent throughout the programme. It was also gratifying to note that this record had been made by a young Norwegian musician — the same violinist whom Jonas Wergeland had used in the programme — so this was just one of many examples of the way in which, through his television series, Jonas Wergeland played his part in promoting many talented artists, thus triggering a wave of creativity within many areas of the Norwegian arts scene.