Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Beowulf

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

As of time of writing I don't know for sure whether or not this Sunday's show will be preempted by broadcast of a women's basketball game. If it is not preempted I have something special planned that lovers of opera singing may not like at all.

My broad spectrum definition of "lyric theater" includes spoken word presentations like the plays of Shakespeare. This Sunday's presentation will be a storytelling session: 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. He is an Irish poet and literary scholar who won the Nobel Prize in literature for 1995. In 2000 he delivered Beowulf in BBC broadcast.

The bards of old declaimed their epics accompanying themselves on the harp. You could think of their style of delivery as an ancient form 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 with passages of recorded music of the old traditional Celtic harp, both as formal interludes or subtle soundbed.