The Discoverer (52 page)

And then there is their music. Not by chance have they called themselves a quartet. They can sing just about anything in perfect four-part harmony. Martin plays a whole range of instruments, from the mouth organ to the didgeridoo, the long pipe traditional to the Australian aborigines. He can also play Joni Mitchell’s songs, including the tricky ‘Song for Sharon’ from
Hejira
with the capo in just the right position and the guitar tuned exactly as the writer herself has it. I mean, not even I can do that, and I’ve listened to my fair share of Joni Mitchell – I, who did, after all, insert an F sharp/A sharp chord on the piano at the beginning of the fifth bar of ‘Gentle Jesus meek and mild’, a harmonic transition which, if I am lucky, is the only thing likely to get me into heaven.

It is evening. I am sitting on the balcony of our hotel room with a whisky. The weather has cleared up. I look across to the other side of the fjord. I was over that way once, to the west of Vik, west of Arnafjord. I saw something there, a man with his head in a woman’s lap, a sight I will never forget.

It is still light. The air is balmy. It is the sort of evening that causes me to remember. Takes me back to the inescapable centre of my life. To the living room and Margrete’s body. A dead wife clad in my own dressing gown. The spring evening outside the windows; a yellow, then a reddish glow on the horizon. I stood there staring. For how long I do not know. I realised that, unconsciously, I had been holding my breath. For more than a minute. For
much more than a minute. As if I was diving for her, hunting for a pale glint of gold in the mud, that flash of gold which sometimes flickered in her eyes. I think I was making a last, desperate effort to save Margrete’s life. If, that is, it was not – again – my own.

Then, as if it were the only natural thing to do, I sat down next to her. I lifted Margrete’s head onto my lap. For a long time I sat like this, sat with her head in my lap. It reminded me of something. Reminded me very much of something else. I had once seen two people sitting exactly like this, in a wild and desolate landscape, a man and a woman on an almost luminously green grassy bank by a lake. The man had been lying with his head in the woman’s lap. The water was like glass, mirroring the encircling mountains. It could have been a happy scene, set in an almost impossibly beautiful landscape. Then all at once the woman began to sing, with a large orchestra behind her, and the whole scene altered character due to the deep solemnity of the music. The woman sang, she sang in German, she sang ‘Mild und leise’ from the end of the third and final scene in the third and final act of Richard Wagner’s revolutionary opera
Tristan and Isolde
; sang out of great pain, great love, great sorrow. Her lover, the man whose head lay in her lap, was dead, and she too was close to death. She sat there, surrounded on all sides by tall cliffs, looking almost as though she were shut inside an enormous cauldron which, because of the singing, the music behind it, seemed to be full of seething passions.

I did not see it when we were filming the scene. Only afterwards, when I was looking at it on the screen, that shot, the posing, was I struck by how much it reminded me of an episode from my youth: Margrete with my head in her lap, in her garden at Grorud.

No other programme in the
Thinking Big
series was as easy to make as the one on Kirsten Flagstad. It made itself. Right from the start I knew that I had to avoid depicting her as she appears in a well-known film clip, kitted out with chainmail and wingéd helmet and spear, her hair fluttering in the breeze from a wind machine as she sings ‘Hojotoho! Hojotoho!’ from
The Valkyrie
, the sort of set-up which, magnificent voice or no, only served to confirm all of the prejudices which so many Norwegians had about opera. I wanted to break this pattern by filming in the outdoors, to bring opera to life, you might say. Not until later did I realise that I had built the whole programme around one of the biggest operatic clichés of all: a person singing as they die.

I had no difficulty in deciding which incident from Flagstad’s life to
highlight
. It had to be her stupendous breakthrough at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in February 1935, performances which turned her into an international star overnight. And since she could be said to have made two debuts, I chose the second one, made four days after the first, when she sang
Isolde – which was also the part she was to sing more than any other in her career. The audience is reported to have been in ecstasies; they had apparently stormed the stage at the end of the second act. And it truly
was
a sensation. For the first time, a Met audience heard the voice which, some said, Wagner must have heard in his subconscious when he wrote the opera: possibly the most dramatic soprano of all time – the Voice of the Century as she was also called. The way I saw it, I was not making a programme about Kirsten Flagstad the woman, but about her lungs. About breathing. Because that was the secret: to be capable of turning air into resonance, into music. Into images. When you heard Flagstad sing, you thought of rivers of gold and floods of light.

I had listened to this opera again and again and was in no doubt that I had to concentrate on the ending, the ‘love-death’. When I mooted the possibility of shooting outdoors, of finding a dramatic natural setting, one of the
cameramen
, who hailed from Vik in Sogn, suggested filming the scene in what he called ‘Sognefjord’s best kept secret’ – to which, sadly, more than a million Norwegians were now to be made privy – namely Finnabotn at the head of Finnafjord. And when we arrived there by boat I knew with every fibre of my being that this was the place. Something about the landscape at Finnabotn told me this was the chance of a lifetime. One almost felt that the scenery alone could have engendered that all-embracing, yet uncompromising, love.

The scene opened with a still from the actual occurrence, the 1935
performance
of
Tristan and Isolde,
Act III, at the New York Met, with Kirsten Flagstad as Isolde and Lauritz Melchior as Tristan, a picture which I held, flickering, on screen while I narrated the events leading up to this moment. Playing in the background – a recurring motif throughout the programme, this – was the famous prelude, a piece of music which, from the first fateful, ominously atonal bars warned of a stable core, the music’s very centre of gravity, which had become distinctly shaky, just as life does when love comes along. Then – let there be light! – I had the dead image of Flagstad and Melchior in their typical opera costumes and extravagant make-up, fade into living film, full colour, and a couple, ordinary people, in the same pose as
Flagstad
and Melchior on the stage, only here they were lying on a green hillside by the lake in everyday clothes, clothes that made one think of young people, teenagers even. And gradually the prelude gave way to the music from Act III and the woman on the grassy bank lip-synched rapturously to Flagstad’s voice, as it sounded in a superb recording from 1953 conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler: a voice full of light, velvet and molten gold.

A couple: a woman with a man’s head in her lap. Only when I was going through the rough footage for the programme did it strike me that this scene could have been drawn straight from my own life. One day I dived into
Svartjern and found a gold bracelet and not long afterwards I found myself lying on a luminously green lawn with my head in Margrete’s lap, while opera music streamed into the garden next door from an open window. She had given me freshly pressed orange juice and I was enchanted. I lay with my head in her lap, revelling in those minutes, not knowing that this would be the
happiest
moment of my entire life.

She, Kirstin Flagstad, or rather, the actress playing Flagstad, or the actress who played all those who have ever had a broken heart or known what it is to lose someone you love, sang ‘Mild und leise’, and as she, Flagstad, this unhappy woman, sang the camera began to pull up, suddenly showing the scene from the air, revealing more and more of the surrounding scenery, the wild and truly spectacular landscape of which the grassy bank by the water was a part. Soon, as the sound of the music and the singing intensified, one saw that these two, the woman with the man’s head in her lap – Isolde with the dead Tristan, Isolde, who was herself about to die, and her dead lover – were not sitting in a crater, by a lake bounded by plunging cliffs, as first thought; as the camera pulled even further up it became apparent that the couple were lying on a grassy slope at the head of a fjord, at Finnabotn which, some kilometres further on, near Finden’s Garth, ran into a narrow sound before opening out into Finnafjord itself which, in turn, ran into Sognefjord with all its many other arms. Even for me it was a stunning prospect; the view of Finnabotn with, barely visible, a couple of dots, two people, two lovers, dying. And then they were gone, as if transformed into music, or to landscape: a fjord,
encircled
by snow-covered mountains, which was also a part of the great fjord, all its branches. The beauty and the drama of Flagstad’s voice accorded perfectly with the beauty and the drama of the scenery. The two became one.

The first time I saw television – probably an episode of
Robin Hood
on a Saturday at Wolfgang Michaelsen’s house in the early sixties – I went up and placed my hands flat against the screen. I felt the prickle of the static, but I was disappointed that nothing happened. The picture, the world inside the box, remained flat. Kristin and the OAK Quartet work with a medium that has overcome this flatness. When I touch the screen something happens. Their screen, that interface with its appetising signposting, gives me the feeling of something leading one endlessly further and further in. When I study their intricate structure map, I cannot help thinking of
māyā
.

I really was not sure about it when I booked the helicopter for the shoot; I was afraid the whole thing might end up being a bit too Hollywoodish, or too much like a music video. But the end result exceeded all expectations. It
took the helicopter a little over ten minutes to climb to 12,000 feet, but byspeeding up the film we managed to get it to fit exactly with the final three minutes of ‘Mild und leise’, the point of view rising as the music intensified, soaring upwards, until both the viewpoint and the music reached their peak with
‘in des
Welt-Atems wehendem All’.
The fabulous thing about it was the way the point of view, the shot, the helicopter spiralled upwards. When I ran through the final cut of the scene I was so moved that I could not speak. The shot of that scene and that landscape from a certain height told us that those two people did not die, there was no way they could die. They were not shut in, they were on a fjord. In their love-death lay the opening of something new.

I struck lucky with that programme. A commentary in one newspaper said that I had cut through the whole debate as to where the new opera house should be situated. I had shown that the opera lay
here,
in the heart of the rugged Norwegian countryside. Norway
was
opera.

Once when she was telling a story from
The Mahabharata,
Kamala
mentioned
one of the weapons which Drona the master gave to the hero Arjuna; an
astra
which could hold all the warriors on a battlefield spellbound by the illusions it created. ‘That’s pretty much what you did with your television
programmes
,’ she said to me.

One writer pointed out that, seen from above, this landscape, with the arms of the fjord reaching deep into the country, looked not unlike a network of nerve fibres, and as such could lead one to think, or imagine, that one was inside the brain, in the area relating to hearing, the enjoyment of sounds – or indeed, why not: inside the nervous system of love itself. I have heard that this place, the grassy bank running down to the water at the head of
Finnafjord
, has become a sacred spot of sorts for lovers. Quite a number of bridal couples have reportedly gone there after their weddings.

There would come a day when it would dawn on me that with this scene I had not only unwittingly reflected one of the happiest moments in my life, but that I had also prefigured the unhappiest. For a moment, as I sat there on the floor of Villa Wergeland, with Margrete’s lifeless head in my lap, I had a feeling of stepping outside of myself, of being lifted up; of seeing myself and Margrete on the living-room floor from a great height. A picture of dead love.

For a long, long time I sat there with her head in my lap, looking round about me. Looking at all the blood. Outside the sky was red, lit up, so it seemed by a huge flare. For one bewildered second I had the idea that she had been shot by some incensed viewer. Or rather: I hoped. But I had known straight
away. She had shot herself. Right before I got home. And something told me that her mind had been perfectly clear when she chose to curl her finger around the trigger. That she had not been consumed by the darkness. That she may merely have seen the darkness approaching. And that she had done it not because of me, but – however inconceivable it seemed – for my
sake
. Shot herself in the heart. In her innermost chambers. Those four strokes at the centre of the Chinese character for love. Distraught though I was, behind it all there was a feeling of anger. You simply did not do something like this. Something so brutal. Why not pills? She was a doctor, for Christ’s sake. She could have cut her wrists, the way other women do. But this was Margrete. And I knew nothing about her. It was almost as if she wanted to show me that I had not understood a single thing.

Why did she do it?

I cursed my stupidity; to think that, in a fit of paranoia and worry about our safety, I had shown her that bloody gun, which I kept in the cupboard in my workshop. I had even had it primed and loaded. I had received threats after a programme on immigrants – I may even have been a little bit proud of this, proud that – after all those tame light-entertainment shows – I had once again made a programme with the ability to shock, something with a touch of dangerous originality. I let her hold the gun, an old Luger, a relic of an enigmatic grandfather. I showed her, solemnly almost, ceremoniously, how to release the safety catch. She had muttered something about
Hedda Gabler
. Smiled. I eyed the gun lying there on the living-room floor, with its
remaining
bullets. Gently I removed her head from my lap. I picked up the pistol. It seemed suddenly heavier. I put it to my head. I beheld her, with the gun muzzle pressed against my temple. It was almost as though I saw her – her beauty – for the first time.