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 alclass="underline" 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.