The Hunchback of Notre Dame: Early Music & Early Film

Prepare to be enchanted by the 1923 silent film, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, as Hesperus, an early music quartet based in Washington, D.C. and directed by Tina Chancey, provides a live soundtrack of French medieval music. Based on Victor Hugo’s novel of the same title, the film starring Lon Chaney is sumptuously set in turbulent 15th-century France, and Hesperus’s songs and dances dovetail with every overwrought gesture.

“The Hunchback of Notre Dame [was shown] to the strains of music by von Bingen, Machaut, Dufay and other composers … so that the great crowd scenes of medieval fairs and street fights played out to raucous medieval dance music and songs. The performance showed scholarship well used in the service of artistry and fun.”—Washington Post