With his solo rendition of “Beowulf,” coming up on Wednesday at Ozawa Hall, Benjamin Bagby may be the only musician during the Tanglewood season who will perform an entire evening without any written music. It’s not that he’s memorized a composition and left the sheet music at home. Yet the essence of his material is more than 1,000 years old.
“Nothing that I’m performing is notated. I’m letting the melody of the language guide me through the story,” says Bagby, who will accompany himself on a six-string Celtic harp. “I do all kinds of different things with my voice, sometimes speaking, sometimes singing, sometimes something in between — all the possibilities of the human voice.”
Like many, Bagby first encountered the medieval classic during high school. He grew up in a Chicago suburb and currently lives in Paris. He’s long been known as a respected figure in the early music movement, having founded the influential ensemble Sequentia some 32 years ago.
In 1990, Bagby was approached by the director of a festival in The Netherlands about creating an evening on “Beowulf.” He’s been obsessed with it ever since and has committed to memory a large chunk of the text in Old English.
At Tanglewood, he’ll offer approximately the first third of the epic poem. A translation into modern English will be projected on a screen behind him.
“No two performances are alike,” he says. That’s a statement that lots of musicians like to make and it could actually be said to be true for every performance. But it seems to be especially the case with Bagby’s “Beowulf.”
“It’s hard to practice this piece alone, and I surprise myself in performance all the time,” says Bagby. “I find myself doing something I wasn’t expecting, and I follow it and sometimes it takes me to a very different place.”
Bagby explains that he’s driven as much by the text as by his connection to the harp. He plays a replica of an instrument that dates from the seventh century.
“The tuning of the harp is the most complicated part,” he says. “There are indications of what the historical tunings were, but there were probably hundreds and every player had his own. It’s like the five-string banjo in Appalachian music. There’s no one tuning, and to the outsider it all seems like banjo music. But to those who really know modal mountain music, there are many different flavors.”
Like a modern troubadour, Bagby offers a fresh take on the classic tale in locales across the globe.
“I identify with the character of the storyteller, who keeps repeating variations on something that’s been heard before,” he says. “It’s like favorite bedtime stories, for children who want to hear it over and over gain. There’s comfort in the cadence and in reliving the feeling of when you first heard it.”
Yet “Beowulf” is also a grand adventure with monsters and violence. It can be discomforting to modern audiences.
“We think of being good Christian, hard-working community folk,” say Bagby. “But in the tribal times, our people were trying to kill other tribes and take away their stuff. That’s gang warfare. There were drive-by shootings but with swords.”
BEOWULF
Ozawa Hall, Tanglewood, Lenox Mass
July 21, 2010
“A sharp wit will be able to judge two things: words and work.”
That phrase, or something close to it, whizzed by sometime during the first hour or so of Benjamin Bagby’s “Beowulf.” The Wednesday night show in Tanglewood’s Ozawa Hall wasn’t so much a concert as an act of story telling and performance art.
There were lots of words spoken and sung, intoned, growled and shouted, and all in old English. Translations appeared on a screen above. There was also the more overarching form of the work, consisting of dramatic scenes and spontaneous semblances of songs. It was often difficult to keep up with the words while also appreciating Bagby’s vivid performance.
Bagby is gifted with a beautiful baritone voice and an innate acting ability. He went seamlessly through a variety of moods and characters. A mouthy drunk was among the most memorable. Even if we didn’t know the language being used, the slurred speech was obvious and familiar.
Bagby sat at a piano bench and accompanied himself on a six string harp. The instrument is about two feet tall and rested on his left hip. Its sound was surprisingly limited in both volume and color. But it still did the job of accompanying and punctuating the tale. Most of the time Bagby plucked the strings in repeating patterns. Only during Beowulf’s battle with the monster Grendel did he let go into broad strums.
The evening covered approximately the first third of the entire Beowulf sage. According to the program, that’s 1,062 lines. Every one of them seemed to appear on the electronic board above the stage. Unlike supertitles in opera, which are often succinct summaries, these felt complete. Sometimes 25 words would fill the screen at a time and then go by in a flash. Unlike at an opera or a foreign film, the mind also had to evoke an image to flesh out the story.
At the evening’s start, it felt like a lot of tedium was ahead, but Bagby swept us along. The best moments were when the story slipped away and the sole focus was his expressive face and remarkable voice.
When it was all said and done and Bagby rose to exit the stage, it was a wonder that so much power flowed out of such a relatively small man.
Originally appeared in the Times Union.
