Strange Bedfellows. The Hebrew Bible and Wagner, in 'Saul and David'

Carl Nielsen’s first opera, Saul og David, turns on the pairing of two seemingly contradictory foundations: the book of 1 Samuel in the Hebrew Bible, and the musico-dramatic influence of Richard Wagner. It is well-known that Nielsen firmly rejected Wagner and Wagnerism in the opera, and it is generally acknowledged that he succeeded: Saul og David sounds not at all like Wagner, and it overtly lacks the web of leitmotivs that so characterizes the Wagner music dramas from Das Rheingold on. Nevertheless, it is clear that Nielsen, along with his librettist Einar Christiansen, learned much from Wagner. Most importantly, the creation of a modern musical drama out of an ancient text was a task that both Wagner and his Danish successors faced. Like the best of Wagner’s music dramas, Saul og David is a model of clarity and intensity – a drama that focuses an abundance of narrative detail in the original source into a taut, psychologically penetrating story, a story masterful in its condensation of action and in its large-scale dramatic and musical form. That the opera appropriates a number of dramatic and musical techniques of the anti-Semitic Wagner in its portrayal of a foundational story from the Hebrew Bible is an irony well worth contemplating.