Beowulf: The Epic in Performance
The Departments of English and Music announce a once-in-a-lifetime event coming to the University of Mississippi campus, as world-class performer Benjamin Bagby will sing the Old English epic poem Beowulf live, accompanied by Anglo-Saxon harp, on Thursday, October 31st at 7:30pm in Nutt Auditorium. Mr. Bagby’s stunning reconstruction of this medieval work (accompanied by modern English supertitles) has been performed in concert from Carnegie Hall to Munich to Bruges, and has earned rave reviews from the San Francisco Chronicle, the Berkshire Review for the Arts, and the New York Times, which writes: “Mr. Bagby comes as close to holding hundreds of people in a spell as ever a man has…that is much too rare an experience in theater.”
Additionally, Mr. Bagby has generously agreed to discuss his craft of performing oral poetry and medieval music theory in a lecture entitled “Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon scop: A Visit to the Workshop of ‘A Singer of Tales,’” which will be held Wednesday, October 30th at 4:00pm in Nutt Auditorium. Through the generous support of the University of Mississippi Lecture Series, the Department of Music, the Department of English, UM Opera Theatre, the Medieval Studies Minor, and Mr. Bagby himself, this event will be free of charge and open to the University of Mississippi community and the public. For additional information, please contact Julia Aubrey (jaubrey@olemiss.edu) or Lindy Brady (lmbrady@olemiss.edu).