Lies and Latin

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”Lies And Latin” was commisioned by Roskilde Chamber Opera to be performed in Roskilde Cathedral on the occasion of the city of Roskilde turning 1000 years in 1998.

Much against my principles I accepted the commision even though it came with the condition that the opera should have Bishop Absalon as its main character. Usually I never accept set subjects, but in this case I very much wanted to work with the composer and I was intrigued by the prospect of writing for a space like Roskilde Cathedral. So I set out trying to find my own angle on one of the main characters of the national danish tradition. And after studying his life and times for a while, mainly through his personally comissioned historian Saxo, I realized that what captured my imagination most, was the relation between the two. The Bishop and the Historian. Why was it so important for Absalon to get the history of Denmark written down in the end of the 12th century ? And how did he force Saxo to write exactly the story that he needed to confirm his own and his fosterbrother Valdemars right to rule the country ? Soon I was deeply engaged in the fascinating times of crusades and scholarship. The more I read, the more it appeared to me that I was very much looking into a mirror of our own times.

Absalon, though a Bishop, was fully involved in the powergames of establishing Denmark as a nation, through all kinds of manuevering and manipulations. One of them being to join the 3. crusade to free Jerusalem - but the danes happened to get there too late...

So he had to stick to pirating the local seas and plunder the Wends. Anything to prove the strength of the men in power - and stress the difference between an us and a them.

Thus the birth of Denmark as a nation. So the Saxo that we have all been reading in school as a historian, and Absalon whose good qualities we have been singing about since the nationalist boom around the time of Grundtvig (1783-1872), suddenly became real people to me. People whose personal lives I then couldn’t help to fantasize into a parabel over their times.

So in ”Lies and Latin” Saxo happens to be non-caucasian - probably the offspring of a very illicit relation between Absalon and an arabian princess whom he met while studying in Paris as a young man (which he did).

And from this secret the story grows around the time when Absalon is writing his will, and Saxo finally realizes that his own story is locked in with that of Absalon and that of Denmark, which Absalon forces him to go on writing despite his hatred to the cold and savage land.

An interesting libretto with great mythical potential - and probably provoking a lot of controversy, had it ever been performed in the shrine of Danish national tradition the Roskilde Cathedral is. But unfortunately the composer, my friend Svend Aaquist, suddenly fell seriously ill, and has as yet not been able to finish the opera.