Musical score is ii + 44 interior pp. Lament for Beowulf (Opus 25), for orchestra and voices, is a musical setting of the final portion of the poem, using Morris's translation for the text. Hanson commented that his intention was

to realize in the music the austerity and stoicism and the heroic atmosphere of the poem. This is true Anglo-Saxon poetry and may well serve as a basis for music composed by an American. (Ewan, p. 162; see Authentication, below)

The piece had its performance debut in 1926 at the Ann Arbor Festival under Hanson's own direction.

MO1 (p. 164) conflates some information about Hanson's Lament for Beowulf with his Symphony No. 2, due to the two compositions' having been put on a published record together. MO2 is clearer.

Both Fry and MO2 indicate that Hanson took his text from the 1895 Morris and Wyatt translation. It is nearly certain that Hanson used the 1898 edition (as given in Relationships, above) or a reprint from it, not the scarce, materially very different objet d'art 1895 edition with its large format and elaborate visual presentation. There is no important difference textually, but the distinction should be noted as a matter of the physical form in which Hanson knew the poem and responded to it.

BAM for score itself; quotation from Hanson and information about debut performance from David Ewen, The Complete Book of 20th Century Music, rev. ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1958), pp. 162-63.