(fl c1010–961 bce). Founder, king and charismatic ruler of the united kingdom of Israel. He occupies a central position in Jewish and Christian musical tradition.
The story of David is told in the books of Samuel, dating from nearly contemporary sources, and 1 Chronicles, from the 4th century bce, containing material of somewhat lesser reliability. He was obviously a man of special talent. Born the youngest son of Jesse (Yishai), a sheep herder from Bethlehem, he acquired, by a combination of prowess at arms, vision, opportunism and force of personality, the kingship of Judah upon the death of Saul, united it to the northern provinces of Israel, established his court at Jerusalem and conquered the neighbouring rivals of Israel within an area stretching from the frontier of Mesopotamia to Egypt. His political achievement, which showed signs of disintegration in his later life, was never again equalled in ancient Israel. Thus he became the ideal of Jewish kingship and was also closely related to the Messianic ideal. These ideals carried over into Christianity so that a medieval ruler like Charlemagne was referred to as the ‘novus David’, and Jesus of Nazareth, whom the Christians accepted as the Messiah, was, according to the Gospels, the ‘son of David’ of the ‘tree of Jesse’.
It is not uncommon to find military leadership and musical ability together in heroes from what might loosely be called the Homeric age of a civilization. Yet the musical achievements associated with David are quite beyond the ordinary. According to 1 Samuel xvi.14–23, he first came to the royal court and earned Saul’s favour as the skilful player whose music dispelled Saul’s evil spirit – an anecdote, incidentally, in conflict with 1 Samuel xvii.1–18, which has David first coming to Saul’s attention as the shepherd boy who slew the Philistine giant Goliath with his sling. Varying traditions attribute at least 73 of the Psalter's 150 psalms to David. This is no doubt an exaggeration, but it is possible that David wrote at least some psalms, since he seems definitely to have composed the moving laments over the deaths of Saul and Jonathan (2 Samuel i.19–27). There is also his association with the musical aspects of the translation of the Ark to Jerusalem and the subsequent establishment of the musical Offices of the Temple. The earlier version of these events (2 Samuel vi–vii), which has David girded only in a linen ephod ‘dancing with all his might before the Lord’ and ‘David with all Israel playing before the Lord on all manner of musical instruments’, is entirely credible. On the other hand, the version in 1 Chronicles xiii–xvi, which adds that David established the Levite orders of Temple musicians, including the leaders Heman, Asaph, Ethan and Idithun, appears for the most part to be a reading of later events into the original history.
Whatever the historical reality, the medieval tradition of David's musical involvement is of at least equal interest to the student of music history. The decisive factor in the development of this tradition was the adoption by the Christian Church of the Psalter as its liturgical hymnbook. Patristic authors spoke of it with great enthusiasm. Athanasius stated that ‘the words of this book include the whole life of man’, while Ambrose called a psalm ‘the blessing of the people … the language of the assembly, the voice of the church, the sweet sounding confession of the faith’, and Pseudo-Chrysostom exclaimed that wherever and whenever the faithful and clergy assemble to pray ‘David is first, middle and last’. This final reference in particular reflects the actual liturgical situation. The Book of Psalms became so central to Christian worship that the singing of it in its entirety each week became the primary function, the opus Dei, of monks and canons during the early Middle Ages. At this time the Psalter was used as a reading primer for young clerics, and a common test of someone’s worthiness to accept a bishopric was the recitation of the 150 psalms from memory.
As a result, copies of the Psalter are among the most common of all medieval manuscripts, and commentaries on the Psalter are the most common type of medieval exigetical text. This accounts for the most dramatic stage of the Davidic tradition: the emergence of David the musician as one of the primary subjects of medieval art. He appears regularly in the frontispiece of early medieval psalters holding a string instrument of one sort or another and surrounded by his four companion musicians Heman, Asaph, Ethan and Idithun. David’s appearance here is a typical instance of the medieval author portrait, but the special musical character of the illustration is determined by a short preface of Pseudo-Bede that frequently appears at the beginning of a psalter. This preface, following Eusebius of Caesarea, paraphrases 1 Chronicles xiii–xvi and speaks of David with his psaltery and his four principal musicians from the tribe of Levi with various instruments including the cymbala, cyrnira, kithara and tuba cornea.
In the 12th and 13th centuries a new type of illustrated psalter was developed, the so-called ‘ferial’ or ‘liturgical’ psalter, in which the initials of just eight psalms are illustrated, those that initiate Matins for each day of the week and Vespers for Sunday. Most of these initials picture David in some task or another inspired by the first verse of the psalm in question; two – the ‘B’ of Psalm i, Beatus vir, and the ‘E’ of Psalm lxxx, Exultate Deo – show him in musical poses. Beatus vir has David seated on a throne playing a string instrument (for an example see fig.1), and Exultate Deo usually has him playing the tuned bells of the Cymbala) and occasionally shows him with a diverse group of instrumentalists. There are also rare instances of Exultate illustration where he is shown playing the organ. A number of particularly splendid early 15th-century ferial psalters survive in which the standard illustrations are replaced by an elegantly painted life of David. Two scenes of musical significance appear in these books: David playing the harp for Saul and David playing a portative organ as he walks beside the Ark. Probably the most prominent instance of 15th-century Davidic musical iconography was the newly developed type of ‘David-in-Prayer’ or ‘David-in-Penitence’, which was used in books of Hours to illustrate Domine ne in furore tua arguas me, Psalm vi, the first of the seven Penitential Psalms. David is pictured kneeling and praying to God the Father above, his harp (or other instruments) abandoned before him (fig.2).
The Davidic tradition took something of a new turn with the Protestant Reformation, this time manifested more in literature and music than in art. Luther, for example, emphasized the curing of Saul by David as a precedent for his own strongly felt belief in music’s power to dispel melancholy and intensify religious fervour. Theoretical treatises such as the first volume of Praetorius’s Syntagma musicum (1614–15) engaged in discussion of Old Testament music in a manner that owes much to patristic psalm commentaries. At the same time, collections of concerted church music, such as Schütz’s Psalmen Davids (1619, 1628), were published along with more numerous collections of chorales and psalm settings for congregational usage, many of which invoke the name of David in prefaces and titles.
However, as the Enlightenment outlook spread through Europe in the 18th century, the Davidic tradition ceased to exist as a living force in the thinking of most important musical figures. Instead it was from time to time invoked in more sophisticated and historically conscious ways, as, for example, metaphor in Schumann’s Davidsbündler (1837), or homage to a remote but intriguing ancient saint in Honegger’s Le roi David (1921).
MGG2 (J.W. McKinnon)
G. Haseloff: Die Psalterillustration im 13. Jahrhundert (Kiel, 1938)
H. Steger: David, rex et propheta (Nuremberg, 1961)
J. Myers: ‘David’, The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, ed. G.A. Buttrick and others, i (New York, 1962), 771–82
J. Hennig: ‘Zur Stellung Davids in der Liturgie’, Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft, x (1967), 157–70
T. Seebass: Musikdarstellung und Psalterillustration im früheren Mittelalter (Berne, 1973)
J. McKinnon: ‘The Late Medieval Psalter: Liturgical or Gift Book?’, MD, xxxviii (1984), 133–57
M. Boyer-Owens: ‘The Image of King David in Prayer in Fifteenth-Century Books of Hours’, Imago musicae, vi (1989), 23–38
J.W. McKinnon: ‘Desert Monasticism and the Later Fourth-Century Psalmodic Movement’, ML, lxxv (1994), 505–21
JAMES W. McKINNON