Press Archive
Intrepid fans of 10th-century Anglo-Saxon verse braved Nordic temperatures Thursday night and nearly filled the Library of Congress's Coolidge Auditorium for an astounding recitation/performance of "Beowulf" by Benjamin Bagby. This unique artist is a medieval music scholar who teaches at the Sorbonne and founded the early music ensemble Sequentia.
With a translation projected directly behind him and a few spare lighting effects, a seated Bagby held his audience spellbound for 75 uninterrupted minutes with just his voice, face and a few gestures with one arm. He keened, growled, sang and emoted, all within the poem's precise metrics, constantly changing tone, pacing and character. The drunken challenge of Unferth was particularly droll, and the bloody combat with the monster Grendel was a tour de force.
An accomplishment of such magnitude and this specialized is not only unique, it is uncritiquable. This has been Bagby's lifework -- with a support system of scholars, linguists and coaches -- and those of us fortunate enough to experience it can only feel gratitude and awe at his achievement.
— The Washington Post (Robert Battey), 17 February, 2007
"Mr. Bagby comes as close to holding hundreds of people in a spell as ever a man has...When he has finished, you leave with the overwhelming impression that you know the anonymous poet who created "Beowulf" more than a dozen centuries ago, that you have felt the man's personality touch you. That is much too rare an experience in theater."
— The New York Times
"Bagby is an uninhibited interpreter and actor. His baritone is strong and expressive, his gestures simple and vivid. He's superb at creating characters ...Like Tolkien, Bagby revels in the blood and gore of the story; he conveys both its earthy humor and its mixture of majesty, mystery and faith. The performance is an extraordinary feat of scholarship, imagination, memory, musicianship and, most of all, story-telling ...He has a communicative power that transcends language."
— The Boston Globe
"What was incontrovertible about Bagby's performance was its ring of truth ...Old English has rarely seemed so alive ...in Beowulf,one could hardly doubt the numinous presence of Orpheus himself."
— The Times (London)
"Bagby's lusty performance was a revelation. The crowd...became totally engrossed in the vivid narrative. Bagby used silence and pause with telling theatrical effect, and he bit into the chewy Anglo-Saxon words as they were an elocutionist's feast ...a personal interpretation of depth, spontaneity and conviction."
— The Cleveland Plain Dealer
"It is an eerie thing to hear this ancient Anglo-Saxon poem that sounds so foreign and yet familiar ...a fluid mingling of vividly rendered direct speech and narration heightened by plain-song chant and haunting melodies."
— The Sydney Morning Herald
"...a thrilling event of an almost shamanistic power."
— NRC Handelsblad (Rotterdam)
"He used every facet of his voice, from a harsh whisper to a full-bellied shout in greeting, to touching on sea rhythms while creating accompanying wavelets on the lyre, to singing in a straight roar or a honey of a baritone ...performing in a language not one in the audience could understand, Bagby held the audience spellbound."
— Seattle Post-Intelligencer
"...a vivid demonstration of what has been lost in the process of becoming modern....Bagby, using a brilliant array of dramatic and rhetorical techniques, made it a dazzling experience. His performances should be recorded and made required listening..."
— The Washington Post
"...he recounts his tale with a shaman's authority....the ring of authenticity is unmistakable."
— The Vancouver Sun
"...chillingly graphic..."
— The Milwaukee Sentinel
"So vivid, so explicit in its dramatic gesture and power of representation, that the whole story could be easily understood."
— The Jerusalem Post
"The performance was riveting – so powerfully yet subtly drawn that it ought to be captured on video and be made required viewing for all students of English."
— Historical Performance (NYC)