The Fitzwilliam Museum

An evening in the victorian parlour: the bible and antiquity at home

Wed 8 June 2016

Fitzwilliam Museum

Registration: £8 (£5 concessions and Friends of the Fitzwilliam Museum. Ticket price includes a glass of wine. To register your interest, please contact 01223 332904 or email education@fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk

Doors open: 18:45

Concert to begin: 19:00

If the Bible and Antiquity were so ubiquitous in the nineteenth century it was because they infused all aspects of culture, from high to low. Set to music in the form of hymnody, partsongs and oratorios, or spoken aloud in the form of poetry, prose and sermons, they shaped the European soundscape, from the stage, church and music hall to the humblest of domestic settings: the Victorian parlour. Join prolific lecturer and broadcaster Simon Goldhill (Professor of Greek Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge) and his colleagues for an evocative evening of music and readings, which will explore this Victorian passion for the ancient and the Biblical. The programme will feature the work of John Keble, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Heinrich Heine, Felix Mendelssohn, Arthur Sullivan and Charles Stanford, performed amid seldom-seen art and artefacts specially displayed for the occasion. The evening will conclude with one of the ghost stories of M.R. James: eminent scholar, onetime Director of the Fitzwilliam and a master at eliciting the pleasant shivers that his contemporaries felt in the encounter with ideas and objects from beyond the grave.

Cost: £8 (£5 concessions)