“My collected works begin with the Carmina Burana,” declared Carl Orff after the successful premiere in 1937 in Frankfurt, where it was staged with elaborate costumes and scenery. A late bloomer, Orff dismissed most his earlier compositions, including three adaptations of stage works by one of the “inventors” of opera, Claudio Monteverdi, as derivative and withdrew many of them. Carmina Burana also turned out to be his most well received by far. While he subsequently composed over a dozen other stage works in a similar musical style, none achieved the popularity of his “Opus One.”

Nineteen thirty-seven? In Frankfurt? Yes, this most popular work, a performance of which occurs once a day somewhere in the world, was not labeled “degenerate,” like so much contemporary music in Nazi Germany. Rather, Goebbels himself lauded Carmina Burana – in spite of its racy text – as a model for the music of the Reich. The composer not only positioned himself during the Nazi regime for the role of Reichsminister für Musik, but also abandoned and refused to help bail out his friends and protectors when they ran afoul of the Nazis. In an article in BBC Music, Tony Palmer relates a conversation with Orff’s only daughter, in which she stated: “He did not really love people; if anything, he despised people unless they could be useful to him.” If there were a contest for the composer with the most despicable character Carl Orff would definitely make the finals.

That being said, Orff is also known for his educational program of music and dance for schoolchildren, called Orff-Schulwerk. So-called “Orff instruments” and his pedagogy are still used in many elementary schools in the United States, Europe and Asia. Orff’s fascination with and sensitivity to instrumental sonority also found its way into his brilliant orchestral writing.

Perhaps it is the physical exuberance and freshness, coupled with a passionate and sometimes racy text – a full translation in programs and record liner notes used to be expurgated – and an easily accessible musical language that made Carmina Burana one of the most popular twentieth-century stage productions. Like Richard Strauss, Orff aimed in this and in his later stage works at a Gesamtkunstwerk (a concept originally used by Richard Wagner as the foundation of his operas), an artistic synthesis in which text, music, scenery and movement are unified and completely coordinated.

Carmina Burana is the title given in 1847 to an edited collection of mostly secular songs (“carmina”) from an early thirteenth-century manuscript discovered in 1803 in a Benedictine abbey in Benediktbeuern, a village in Bavaria (hence the Latinized form of the name, “burana”). The manuscript contains about 250 medieval poems and songs, including works in Latin, Middle High German and French, the bulk of which do not appear in any other manuscript. They were assigned to categories: clerical poems, love songs, drinking and gaming songs, and two religious dramas. The collection is clearly a songbook, since many of the pieces included musical notation, but in a style of over a century earlier that did not indicate either exact pitches or rhythms. The actual melodies had to be reconstructed from other later manuscripts. The poets are mostly anonymous but are believed to have been “goliards,” once thought to be defrocked priests and monks; the term is now considered to be an ironic designation of poets who wrote satires and parodies for carnivals and festivals. The best known of these was the “feast of fools,” during which mock popes and cardinals satirized the religious life and parodied church services.

Although the Benediktbeuern Manuscript contains no exact notation, Orff was certainly acquainted with the theories of reconstructing medieval secular song, which he often incorporated into his own settings. Since early medieval musical manuscripts contain no specific instrumental accompaniment or harmony, Orff's settings have little or no harmonic development, relying instead on terse melodic motives and rhythms derived from the meter of the poems themselves. All of the poetry is strophic, and Orff creates stunning instrumental interludes and accompaniments whose variety and vivid tone color break the monotony of the simple melodies.

Orff employs a large orchestra to give him a wide palette of timbre and tone color, but he only occasionally uses the entire orchestra at one time, and then for dramatic effect. Although Carmina Burana is often performed in concert, numerous choreographers have tried their

hand at staging it for chorus and dancers as the composer had intended. The focus on rhythm makes all of the choral numbers quite danceable, and even the solo arias are easily adaptable to dance.

The selection of poems serves as a symbolic statement on man’s subjugation to Fortune. Contrary to popular belief, the symbol of wheel of fortune did not begin as a TV game show but can be traced to ancient Roman civilization and adorns the original thirteenth-century manuscript. Carmina Burana opens and closes with a choral ode “O, Fortuna,” a paean to Fortune, Empress of the World, “changeable as the moon.” Within this frame are three large sections, taken from various parts of the original manuscript.

Part 1, "In Springtime" begins with an a cappella chorus intoning a welcome to spring. "Veris leta facies," (Spring’s bright face) with oriental-sounding interludes, the modern instruments imitating gongs and bells. The baritone solo maintains the atmosphere. In the poem welcoming spring, "Ecce gratum" (Behold spring), two spring dances frame two poems, "Floret silva nobilis" (The noble forest blooms), first in Latin, then translated into German, accompanied by drums and tambourines. In "Chramer gip die warve mir" (Hawker, give me some rouge) some women sing the verses, accompanied by a humming refrain for the men and women.

Part 2, "In the Tavern," conjures the masculine world of the medieval tavern, containing perhaps the most distinctive songs in the collection: the lament of the roasting swan, "Olim lacus colueram" (Once I lived in the lakes) – the only song in the piece that departs from the diatonic intervals of medieval music; and the song of the drunken abbot of Cockaigne (a medieval utopia), whose satirical rant parodies monastic chant. The section ends with a rousing ode to dissipation and debauchery.

In Part 3, the raucous bar-room ambience shifts to the delicate – but not too refined – world of courtly love, as the women and soprano soloist admit that a girl without a man lacks all delight. The baritone returns, now in the guise of a troubadour, the verses of his song, "Dies, nox et omnia" (Day, night and ever) yearning for his absent lover. Part 3 concludes with a choral dance, "Tempus est iocundum," (The time to celebrate) debating the relative merits of chastity and promiscuity. Entering with a more than two-octave leap to a pianissimo high C on the word "Dulcissime" the solo soprano succumbs to her lover.

In the addendum to Part 3, "Blanziflor et Helena," a hymn to the beauty of Helen and Venus, Orff employs in the full chorus and orchestra, and finally bringing the wheel of Fortune around full circle with the reprise of "O Fortuna."