Program Notes for May 13, 2023
Carmina Burana Carl Orff
Composer: born July 10, 1895 in Munich, Germany; died March 29, 1982 in Munich Germany
Work composed: 1935 – 1936
First performance: June 8, 1937 at Frankfurt Opera, Bertil Wetzelsberger conducting
Instrumentation: solo soprano, solo tenor, solo baritone, large mixed chorus, small mixed chorus, children's chorus, two pianos, and percussion
Estimated duration: 65 minutes
Most recent RSO performance: November 13, 2010, Steven Larson conducting
Carl Orff composed Carmina burana at just about the midpoint of his life, and it divided that life into two entirely different periods. Its enormous success made him a well-known personage with healthy performance royalties flowing in, and it induced him to destroy everything he had composed up to that point and to begin his creative life over again in an entirely new way. This was an unlikely outcome for what might have been a work of purely academic interest, setting to music a bouquet of old poems in Medieval Latin (plus a few tidbits in Medieval German).
Orff was an intensely private man. He was willing to talk about his music, but rarely about his personal or intellectual life, and, with so many early works destroyed, it is difficult to say much about it before Carmina burana. Two things are clear: from childhood, he adored the theater, and he began writing music for puppet plays.
Although he was largely self-taught as a composer, his early idols included Arnold Schoenberg, whose Chamber Symphony he transcribed for piano duet. But at the same time, he studied Renaissance polyphony and early Baroque music, he researched into African music, and he followed the developments of modern dance with great interest. Working with Dorothee Günther, he founded a school for the education of children that combined music, gymnastics, and dance. His contributions to music education would have made him renowned even if he had not composed one of the most popular scores of the century.
The impetus for the composition of Carmina burana was Orff’s discovery of an 1847 volume containing a series of fascinating poems, mostly in Latin, and a few in Medieval German and French, found in a manuscript that had been assembled and richly illuminated in the monastery of Benediktbeuern. The eighth-century monastery was secularized in 1803 and its library was transferred to Munich. There the splendid medieval manuscript came to public notice when the Court Librarian, Johann Andreas Schmeller, published his edition of the text, to which he gave the Latin title Carmina burana (“Songs of Beuern”). A century later, when Orff encountered the book, he was struck by the immediacy, vividness, and humanity of these lively poems. With the help of the poet Michel Hofmann, he organized twenty-four of them into a libretto.
In setting these poems to music, Orff aimed at the most direct kind of musicmaking: simple, memorable tunes, richly colorful orchestration, and driving rhythms. There are hints of Stravinsky, and Richard Taruskin has pointed out several passages that are simple plagiarisms, though Orff keeps his rhythms far simpler, squarer, and more immediately catchy. The result was hypnotic—and thus open to the frequently repeated criticism that his music is essentially propaganda, though not necessarily Nazi propaganda. (O Fortuna has been used in television commercials for any number of products, and it is often used for background music in trailers of forthcoming action films when the actual soundtrack of the film has not yet been composed.)
After the premiere in June 1937, he wrote to his publisher, B.Schott, “Everything I have written to date, and which you have, unfortunately, printed, can be destroyed. With Carmina burana my collected works begin.”
From that time on he worked almost exclusively for the stage, creating two further large chorus and orchestra works which, with Carmina burana, make up an evening-length trilogy called Trionfi; four charming operas based on German folk tales; settings of plays by Sophocles and Aeschylus in a rhythmic, chanted style (with little music in the sense of tuneful melodies); a setting of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, combining speech and music; and a series of three sacred mystery plays.
It is worth recalling (since we often hear it only in concert), that Carmina burana is really a stage piece, too. If we translate the complete title as given at the head of this note, we get “Songs of Bavaria—Secular songs to be sung by singers and choruses to the accompaniment of instruments and also of magic pictures.” In fully staged productions, the “magic pictures” are offered by dancers.
Schmeller’s edition of Carmina burana opened with a great paean to the goddess Fortuna (Fortune), who rules all things, making life unpredictable. Orff was greatly struck by this poem, and he chose to make O Fortuna the beginning and end of his work, a set of huge bookends with a driving rhythm and the virtually unchanging tonic chord of D. Between these outer pillars, he created three scenes:
In Springtime and On the Green (pastoral and genre poems)
In the Tavern (drinking songs)
The Court of Love, concluding with the ecstatic address to Blanziflor (Blanchefleur) and Helena (love songs)
The opening sections after O Fortuna are set to melodies that evoke the world of liturgical chant, but the colors become brighter and the melodies gradually more dancelike, particularly in the scene On the Green. The music culminates in a rollicking piece of erotic fantasy in which the poet’s dream extends even to possession of the Queen of England.
The tavern of part II is purely a male preserve. Baritone and tenor solos sing the vigorous Estuans interius and the remarkably original Olim lacus colueram (“Lament of the Roasted Swan”), with its keening melody (abetted by the bassoon) and shivering response from assorted winds and percussion. The Abbott of Cockaigne (a mythical land of luxurious idleness) sings of his desires, followed by the tongue-twisting drinker’s patter song from the chorus, a catalogue of all the kinds of people who drink.
Following this rowdy masculine scene, the Court of Love is full of delicate traceries in its opening number. The baritone bemoans his lovelorn state, after which a sextet of males chant, with a kind of musical leering, an account of what goes on when “a girl and a boy dally in a little room.” “Happy conjoining!” they shout. Probably the single loveliest moment in the score is the delicate In trutina, in which the soprano, her voice kept in a modest low range, gently debates with herself the conflicting claims of “lascivus amor” (“licentious [or frolicsome] love”) and “pudicitia” (“modesty”).
The music continues to drive, with greater urgency, as the “happy time” of spring brings to the minds of men and women alike the same urges: “O o o, now I burn utterly with a virginal passion.” The soprano has now made up her mind; in a marvelously understated passage, she soars to the top of her range and delicately announces, “Sweetest boy, I give myself entirely to you.” The full chorus and orchestra make their sonorous address to Blanzifor and Helena, leading back to the final evocation of Fortune, whose wheel still turns, lifting some and plunging others from the pinnacle.
Carmina burana lay under a cloud outside of Germany for some years after its first performance because of Orff’s evident willingness to stay in Germany and work there through the Nazi period, and on account of Hitler’s fondness for the piece. Orff was by no means the only German artist who remained there throughout the war, though this led to rumored assertions that he was a Nazi or a sympathizer. In an interview with Glenn Loney late in his life and published in Opera Monthly (July-August 1994), the normally reclusive composer admitted that he knew of these rumors and declared, “This annoys me very much, because, when I wrote [Carmina burana] in 1936, I was in the opposition—always!—and it was, in effect, against the trends of that time.” After all, the work celebrates the pleasures of the flesh in a way that was not consonant with the official puritanical views of the Nazi regime. (Though, to be sure, the Nazis also strongly opposed the morality of the Christian churches, and in this sense Carmina burana could be seen as promoting primal sexual instincts.)
Orff’s later theater piece, Astutuli (The Wise Ones), written in 1945, though not produced until eight years later, is an ironic version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” in which a group of typical Bavarians are taken in by a Gaukler (“conjurer, charlatan”), who makes lavish promises. A small child reveals that the adults are all naked. They are both ashamed and angry, vowing to punish the scoundrel—yet he soon returns in a different guise and takes them in all over again. Astutuli raises the question of the competence of leaders who promise everything and the folly of a populace that repeatedly buys the particular brand of snake-oil that the leader is selling. But, like virtually all of Orff’s work after Carmina burana, Astutuli remains essentially unknown outside of Germany.
© Steven Ledbetter