Much better than I expected:
No better than I expected. Pretty, but ruinous, putting most of the accents in the wrong places, badly reductive.
PERsolVANT graTES digNAS
An object lesson in how not the read Vergil.
I’m really enjoying it! It’s certainly not an impeccable reading at all, but I think that really isn’t the point here. To me, this performance is strange, creative, and, what’s most important, fun.
That’s precisely what I was thinking. And they at least managed to get the elisions right, which has to count for something.
Admittedly far from perfect. However, can I respectfully make a suggestion? Could you record a reading of these same lines to give everyone a good idea of how it should be done, or recommend a recording (perhaps on Youtube) where it’s done right (not necessarily the same lines). We all want to improve at this.
I personally think the readings by Johan Winge are among the best. He has recorded the whole first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for example:
http://alatius.com/latin/meta01.html
On his YouTube channel there’s a recording of a passage from the Aeneid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofivALSqOCk
These are not musical interpretations, of course.
Thanks for the Winge links. Yes that’s more like it. He doesn’t just bash the beat, he respects the word accents. That makes all the difference.
Here is another musical rendition, this time of IV. 648-660. It is operatic, with a woman’s voice rendering Dido’s lines. Much more respectful of the language. Though it loses a lot of - what I at least read as - the aggression of her final lines, it is pretty.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbmkHu_uAk0