Carl Orff

Carmina Burana
Carl Orff was born in 1895 in Munich, Germany and died in 1982 in Munich. He composed Carmina Burana from 1935 to 1936, and it was first performed in Frankfurt under the direction of Bertil Wetzelsberger in 1937. The score calls for soprano, tenor, and baritone soloists, large chorus, small chorus, boy chorus, 3 flutes, piccolo, 3 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, celeste, 2 pianos, and strings.
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Carl Orff’s reputation as a composer derives from a mere twelve works. He wrote many more than that, but with Carmina Burana he changed his methods of composition so radically that he disavowed all his previous music. “Everything I have written to date,” he wrote his publisher, “and which you have unfortunately printed, can be destroyed. With Carmina Burana, my collected works begin.”
Actually, Orff’s name would still be known among musicians and music educators even if he had never composed a note. Orff believed that even very young children had latent musical abilities. By the 1930s he had developed a system that combined movement and dance with musical improvisation on simple pitched percussion instruments. His methods were so effective that his ideas still inform early-childhood music education today.
Those ideas seem to have changed his approach to composition, too. He simplified his music greatly, and came to believe that for music to have the maximum impact it must be part of a theatrical presentation including the spoken word, singing, movement, and dance. When he first encountered the poems of Carmina Burana, he saw his chance to put his new theories about composition into effect.
Carmina Burana means “Songs of Beuren,” and refers to a 13th-century manuscript discovered in the Benedictine abbey of Benediktbeuern in 1803 and published in 1847. It is a collection of some 250 poems left by the goliards, itinerant clerics and scholars who rejected what the church had become and concerned themselves instead with earthly delights. Today we might call them college dropouts.
The poems are mostly in Latin, the international language of the day, but some are in medieval German and old French as well. Their subject matter is wide-ranging, with particular emphasis on eating, drinking, gambling, and love-making, all peppered with a lively distrust of authority. The theme that binds them together is fortune, that mysterious force that may lift us to great heights one moment only to dash us to the ground the next.
In fact it was the manuscript’s cover, with its depiction of the goddess Fortuna standing with her wheel of Fate, that inspired Orff to read on and ultimately compose this work. Orff creates a cover to his own book by beginning and ending Carmina Burana with the dramatic chorus “O Fortuna,” a mesmerizing lament on how the “whirling wheel” of Fortune is invariably fickle.
Three main sections follow. The first of these is Primo vere (In Springtime), and as the first song begins you can hear the frost still clinging to the leaves. The baritone soloist warms things up, and the words and music progress from the awakening of Nature to the awakening of sensual desire.
Next comes In Taberna (In the Tavern), an ode to drinking and its ability to soften the blows of misfortune. Listen for the tenor soloist (in his only appearance) as the swan lamenting his presence on a rotating spit, and the concluding song that lists, in comprehensive detail, all those who partake of drink.
The third section is Cour d’amours, or Court of Love. It begins rather innocently, but things become steamier as the songs follow one another. Finally a reprise of “O Fortuna” brings the work to a close—the wheel has turned another full circle.
Orff’s new style of composing burst forth fully-formed in Carmina Burana. The music may be characterized as much by what is left out as by what is put in. Melodic lines are simple and repeated without variation; they may have a long flow similar to Gregorian chant, or be made up of short repeated motives. Harmonies are basic and often static. Blocks of homogeneous color are used instead of subtler combinations. Counterpoint and development are simply absent.
The ruling force is rhythm: primal, urgent, hypnotic, it is the lifeblood of Carmina Burana. It comes in all varieties, from free-sounding recitative-like passages to severely regimented patterns. Much of it flows directly from the text itself.
This is music reduced to a state more elemental than even the neo-classicists could imagine; it has been called primitive by detractors and admirers alike. It exists outside any identifiable mainstream of music—it evolved from no other sort of music, nor was any school of composition founded upon it. Yet it succeeds just as Orff intended it to, for there are few more powerful experiences in music than this.

                                                                —Mark Rohr