The Seducer

O Mio Tesoro

It was not unnatural that Jonas Wergeland should have run into Nina G. at Det Norske Opera. It happened right after the interval, while Don Giovanni, the Lord of Misrule, in the shape of a young Knut Skram, was kneeling under a balcony dressed in his servant’s clothes, playing, or pretending to play a mandolin, while singing cajolingly to Donna Elvira’s maid, begging her to come to the window: ‘Deh vieni alla finestra, o mio tesoro’. It was just at that moment, as Don Juan was proving that he would do anything to win a woman, even assume another identity — in the midst of this serenade, so outrageously absurd and yet so infinitely beautiful — that Jonas Wergeland became aware that someone was looking at him, or not looking but staring, drinking him in with their eyes. He turned, to be met by the gaze of a girl sitting a few seats away from him, on the row in front. The gaze was that of Nina G. and her eyes were as round and full of desire as the o’s in ‘O mio tesoro’. Then she looked away, turning her eyes back to the stage, but even in the dark, that one glimpse was enough. Jonas could tell straight away, by the tremor running down his spine, that this girl evinced a rare capacity for bestowing warmth.

So how do the pieces of a life fit together? Like an organ in which the pipes sound from different corners even when the keys you are pressing are right next to one another?

Jonas had for many years been one of the youngest, not to say the youngest habitué of the Oslo jazz scene and, despite the fact that after 1965 jazz had gone into something of a slump, there were still a number of places one could frequent — which is to say that, apart from Friday nights at the newly-opened Beehive Club, Jonas basically had to sneak in to such places, aided and abetted by friends. One of the trickiest to gain entry to was the jazz club at the halls of residence in Sogn, although here, on the other hand, it was easy to blend into the crowd of students who sat there shaking their heads and slugging red wine, never knocking the ash off the cigarettes that dangled from the corners of their mouths. There has been a lot of talk about rock music and its detrimental effect on the hearing, but Jonas always felt that someone ought to have checked how all that shaking, and in many cases rotation of the head, had affected the 1968 generation, since he had the suspicion that so much drunken head-tossing in time, for example, to Arild Andersen’s driving bass lines must have led to a sort of collective whiplash effect. Jonas eventually left the scene, however, not so much because he had witnessed so much inordinate and alarming ‘digging’ but more because the music as such lost its outsider quality, perhaps precisely because in the end the very ‘freeness’ of the melodies and the rhythms had become so utterly predictable. And so he had gone in search of something else, and what he found was the opera. Let me put it this way: not all that many young people frequented Den Norske Opera in the years after 1968, and certainly not those of a rebellious bent.

The first operas he saw were Verdi’s Falstaff and Bizet’s Carmen, but it was Wagner and The Flying Dutchman that really showed him he was on the right track and not, as some might think, because of the story: a man condemned to sail on and on forever. No, it had more to do with the utterly unbelievable, tempestuous music that set the dresses of the ladies in the red plush auditorium fluttering from the very first notes of the overture and, not least, a sumptuous Aase Nordmo Løvberg in the role of Senta. The way I see it, Jonas Wergeland must have been one of her biggest fans at that time. He was forever popping up to the second floor of the Stortorvet Inn, vainly hoping to catch a glimpse of her in the booth just inside the door where the opera singers hung out, watched over by a waiter named Nyhus whom the singers — as one might expect, with their sense for all things Italian — had dubbed ‘Casanova’.

Jonas was captivated by the opera, the mere fact of being able to sit in that red auditorium, in the dark, and listen to a load of absolute claptrap swathed in bombastic music. To be honest, he liked it so much that he sometimes caught himself shaking his head exactly like some jazz freak, in a combination of incredulity and rapturous glee. It made his toes curl with delight to hear these bedizened characters giving vent in song to their passions and frustrations, particularly on those few occasions when the whole thing was sung in German. He could not get enough of it: the extravagant gestures, all of that totally unnatural set-up, with people dotted about the stage like chess pieces, singing, wailing of their intrigues; those passages in which the most hopelessly sentimental words were poured out with every last ounce of sincerity. Jonas sat there in the dark, wondering what it could be that moved him so deeply, and he came to the conclusion that it had to be a sort of pathos by proxy, that these people on the stage were going over the top for his sake, too, to save him having to do so in his own life. There was something about the artificiality of it all, the utter remoteness from reality that lent an air of fantastic comedy to these overdressed tableaux; the recitatives in particular were priceless. ‘If you feel like an alien on this Earth then do something about it, go to the opera,’ he told Axel. ‘Experience the unreality of society taken to the extreme.’ Jonas sat there in the dark, revelling in it with all his senses. The opera also heavily reinforced his decision to become the Duke, to tell his own story, independent of Norwegian daily life, outside of Norwegian society. Up and down the country people were sitting watching television or reading magazines or doing their homework or tinkering with the car or demonstrating against the USA. Here he sat, Jonas Wergeland, in his rightful surroundings, in a red plush auditorium ringing with ear-splitting song, in the centre of Oslo, in the centre of the nation’s capital and yet so marvellously, liberatingly outside.

Naturally some of the Young Socialists at school got wind of it and spread the word about this appalling example of class betrayal: a Grorud lad at the haute bourgeois Opera House. During one fierce discussion in the schoolyard, in the shed yet again, not all that unlike an outdoor stage, when the Young Socialists asked whether he ought not to be making his points in song, one politically active girl had dared him to give a talk about opera at a meeting of Owl, the Cathedral School debating society, and in the heat of the moment he had agreed. Owl could be described as something of an intellectual sandpit, but it was, even so, a well respected platform, at any rate until the Red Front took over and turned the whole thing, as always, into a hopelessly sectarian business. The most disparate figures had willingly taken part in Owl meetings in their various capacities, people like Reiulf Steen, Nils Christie and Berthold Grünfeldt, as well as a high-flying Einar Forde, who made a passionate speech about draft-dodging as a political statement, and the chief medical officer, Karl Evang, who talked about drugs and caused a furore by handing out samples of various substances. In this forum, Jonas had contemplated giving a talk entitled ‘Opera as Socialism’ — working not from the inherently intriguing fact that the Opera had taken over the old People’s Theatre premises but from the idea that opera, like socialism, wanted to change the real world, while both socialist ideals and opera involved the necessary dash of naivety and pathos.

Jonas was not, however, giving any thought to that right then, sitting as he was in the balcony, in the third row, with Knut Skram on bended knee down on the stage, Knut Skram with whom he had once exchanged a word or two at the Stortorvet Inn while the singer — already a star, in Norway at any rate — was displaying his partiality for smørbrød with cod roe. Now here was that same Knut Skram, kneeling down on the stage, too young to play Don Juan, but wearing a wig that gave him a balding pate, being someone else entirely, singing in Italian, no one would imagine that he had ever eaten smørbrød with cod roe in a Norwegian restaurant. Jonas was giving no thought whatsoever to what he would do at the debating society meeting; he was too busy just savouring the moment.

Even in the foyer, before the performance began, there had been an extra buzz of excitement in the air, possibly because it was just before Christmas. The whole thing reminded Jonas of his first visits to the theatre with the school, the formality of such occasions: the boys showing up with slicked-down hair and bowties, and the girls looking almost unrecognizable, little ladies in their best dresses with a drop of stupefying scent in the hollows of their throats, none of which stopped them from chucking fruit drops at one another and flirting freely and outrageously during the interval, as if that were the real point of a visit to the theatre. And in the midst of it all one could not help but be seduced by the merry-go-round action of the revolving stage and the dreamy blue shimmer of the stage lighting, by something unreal which was nonetheless sheer magic: as if the lie went so far that it bit its own tail and became true.

So, too, with this. Jonas had had the time of his life from the minute the curtain went up to disclose a stairway, a balcony, some arches; simplified forms suggestive of Spanish architecture: in other words even this, even the scenery, was stylized, a clear sign that one had left reality and all need for credibility far behind and should prepare, for instance, to see the Commendatore and Don Giovanni crossing swords in time to the music. Amazing. Jonas had the urge to clap. A fight to the death in time to the music. How they must have had to rehearse that, Jonas thought. He gasped ecstatically when the Commendatore was mortally wounded and lay there singing as he died. Fabulous. Jonas had to restrain himself from shouting ‘bravo!’ The fact that the libretto was in Norwegian made it all the more hilarious. In Don Giovanni the serenade was the only piece sung in Italian. And it was at the very moment when Jonas was most enjoying being able to sit there in that scented atmosphere, watching a bedizened man lying dying on a stage and singing as he did so, that the whole perspective suddenly swung around, like a revolving stage and all of a sudden he realized that this opera, or any opera whatsoever, was not in fact an escape from reality; on the contrary, it held up a mirror to reality. That was the way life was; it was only that so few people had realized it. People fenced in time to the music and sang while they were dying. After this perceptual about-turn, Jonas viewed the rest of Don Giovanni as a masterful facsimile of all the melodramatic and banal aspects of life, with coincidences, masked faces and mistaken identities all the way. So when, only a moment after killing the Commendatore, Don Giovanni tried to seduce Donna Elvira, who for some strange reason he did not recognize, even though he had actually been married to her for a short time, Jonas no longer found any of this odd. Quite the reverse: he applauded this totally unlikely situation as a nigh-on perfect reflection of the society in which he lived with the result that the entire opera was transformed into passages of almost startling beauty. Not only Don Juan’s duet with Zerlina, ‘Give me your hand’, in the scene where he gate-crashes the peasants’ wedding, but also and to as great an extent the farcical, not to say pornographic, sequence in which Zerlina tried to appease her betrothed, Masetto, going down on all fours, wiggling her backside at him and singing ‘Beat me, beat me’ in such a way that even those members of the audience who had become totally, breathlessly, wrapped up in the story — such people do exist! — could not help but laugh.

To Jonas, even the interval took on a new dimension, becoming if possible an even more crucial part of the performance than in his schooldays, more like an entr’acte in which the audience unwittingly played the lead. Jonas stood at the bar, listening to the chatter, with people referring to the singers by their first names as if these were pivotal lines in the piece, and where even the merest snatch of conversation could cause him to see whole scenes, and even the music, in a new light, as when one elderly gentleman asked another elderly gentleman: ‘Did you notice the lovely lady who was playing the cello?’

In any case, it was directly after the interval that Nina G. had prompted him to turn and presented him with a gaze or a face that was more than enough to trigger that tingling between his shoulder-blades. For the remainder of the second Act Jonas was acutely aware of her presence, like an additional layer to the music, or as a sort of bonus, over and above the pleasure of seeing Donna Elvira manage to confuse Don Giovanni, her beloved, with his servant, merely because they had swapped clothes. Jonas could not remember when he had seen a better piece of entertainment. What a way of looking at identity! You put on other clothes and — hey, presto! — even a woman who has been this man’s mistress takes you for him! And throughout all the fun and games, which constituted, mark you, an uncannily accurate reflection of real life, out of the corner of his eye he could just make out the back of Nina G.’s head, although of course he did not know her name at that point. Not until the very end, in the scene in which the Statue, which is to say the dead Commendatore, complete with ashen-grey mask, appears at Don Giovanni’s table, and the latter grasps his hand and bemoans its deathly chill — only then did Nina G. turn towards him again. They exchanged a long, lingering glance. Then she smiled. Jonas felt her warmth hit him like the breath of a warm dry wind, a pleasant contrast to Don Giovanni’s cold end on the boards of the stage.

The director of this production had done away with the epilogue and its moralistic finger-wagging, and thus the opera finished right after the point when Don Giovanni, refusing point blank to repent of anything whatsoever, curled in on himself and, instead of having him engulfed in flame, a beam of light was shone only on his upper half, until he had sung his last words, after which he collapsed and the light went out. Despite, or perhaps precisely because of the absence of, any moral lecture, the audience went wild; they rose to their feet, shouted ‘bravo!’ and whistled in a manner more normally associated with sporting events as if this, with a handful of exceptions, exceedingly middle-class audience wholeheartedly approved of Don Giovanni’s impenitence, a rebel to the last: a response which, to Jonas’s mind, served as a fitting end to that exceptionally exuberant evening and the unusual view of things it had afforded him.

Jonas saw Nina G.’s back disappearing in the direction of the exit, but he took his time, considering whether to approach her in the cloakroom. When he emerged into the corridor and looked around for her, however, she was nowhere to be seen. I have already said that Jonas Wergeland never wooed or made any effort to win a girl. This, if only in his head, was the one exception and one which I ascribe to the whole mood of the evening — he was, after all, standing in Den Norske Opera. Jonas was all set to follow that girl, get down on one knee outside her window and sing a serenade. Strictly speaking, the mood he was in he could have done just about anything.