Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Beowulf

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

In days of yore, long before the advent of radio or TV, people listened to stories to while the long cold winter nights, gathered there together to warm themselves by the flickering light of the fire. Although lovers of opera singing may not like this Sunday's programming, I want you listeners to have one of the all-time great storytelling experiences, as I present Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon epic poem read in its entirety in an idiomatic modern English translation by Seamus Heaney.

Heaney translated the ancient text himself and reads it aloud in a compellingly dramatic yet conversational manner. Seamus Heaney is an Irish poet and literary scholar who won the Nobel Prize in literature for 1995. In 2000 he delivered Beowulf in BBC broadcast. Those revered storytellers, the bards of old declaimed their epics accompanying themselves on the harp. You could think of their style of delivery as an ancient forerunner of operatic recitative. Seamus Heaney's voice is totally unaccompanied in the aircheck of the radio broadcast that was released on compact disc in the US through the Highbridge Company.

To provide some musical relief and suggest recitative, I will intersperse my broadcast of Beowulf with passages of recorded music of the old traditional Celtic harp, both as formal interludes, or in subtle soundbed.