Carl Orff, German composer and music educator, was born in Munich in 1895 to a prominent family of military officers and educators; he died in the same city in 1982. Orff claimed that the greatest early musical influence on him was his mother, an accomplished pianist, who provided his first piano lessons when he was five. Later, he studied cello and organ and after a stint in World War I (where he was seriously injured and returned home to recuperate) enrolled in the Academy of Music in Munich. He had begun to compose music early, and as a teenager wrote Zarathustra—for soloist, orchestra, and chorus—based on Nietzsche’s philosophical novel.
A pre-eminent music educator, Orff founded the Günther School in 1924; its unique pedagogy combining gymnastics, dance, and music has become a model for music education to this day. A fundamental goal of Orff’s musical program is the development of a sense of rhythm in children via group exercise and the performance of percussion instruments. Orff was associated with the school and its programs throughout his life.
As the noxious influence of Nazism fully polluted German society by the 1930s, Orff—who remained in Germany throughout World War II—had to perform the delicate balancing act of managing to stay within the good graces of the Third Reich (a fate not unlike that of fellow composer Dmitri Shostakovich in the Soviet Union) in order to continue writing and performing his music. He had in fact been labelled a cultural leftist by a Nazi watchdog group, and it was the fantastic and fortuitous success of Carmina Burana in 1937 that not only “saved” the musician but also garnered him fame and prestige within the Nazi establishment. In the absurd world of absolutist politics, Orff was later asked to write new incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, since the Nazis had branded the music of Mendelssohn “degenerate” (they seemed not to mind Shakespeare). Orff never completed that work.
All the while Orff worked within the Nazi state by bringing his musical ideas to German school children and Hitler Youth groups. Though never joining any Nazi organizations, Orff nonetheless had to support Nazi policies, if only tacitly. For that reason, he was compelled to go through the Allied denazification process at the conclusion of World War II. The Allies—who had occupied and divided up Germany at the conclusion of the war—wanted to rid the young democratic nation of Nazis and their sympathizers. No proof could be produced of any active support of the Nazis on Orff’s part (though he had been paid handsomely for his musical works); he escaped the fate of other artists, like Kirsten Flagstad, the famed Wagnerian soprano or Wilhelm Furtwängler, the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, who were vilified for their purported collaboration with Nazis. At the conclusion of the denazification trials, Orff was permitted to continue writing and publishing his music.
Composed in 1935-36, Carmina Burana is a scenic cantata based on 24 poems from a medieval collection of poems with the same name. The poems were contained in a 13th-century manuscript found years later at the Bavarian monastery of Benediktbeuern. In the composition of his magnum opus, Orff followed an 1834 edition of the poems, from which the libretto was derived. The work’s full title is Carmina Burana: Cantiones profanae cantoribus et choris cantandae comitantibus instrumentis atque imaginibus magicis, or, more colloquially and less painfully, Songs of Beuern: Secular songs for singers and choruses to be sung together with instruments and magical images. From the title, it is clear that Orff’s original intention would have been a staged work that might have involved dance, visual design, or other, “magical” features, though these are typically absent in contemporary performances.
While the Latin words “cantiones profanae” can be translated as “secular songs” in English, their more racy implications are pertinent as well, for these earthy, profane song-poems—composed in medieval German as well as Latin—celebrate drinking and debauchery, love and lust. The poems were likely the work of goliards, renegade and itinerant students and low-level clerics of early medieval Europe, whose poetry was sexually suggestive and satirical in nature and whose subject of criticism was typically the Catholic Church.
Orff divided his work into four sections, opening and ending with “Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi,” or “Fortune, Empress of the World,” arguably the most well-known and often-performed piece of the entire cantata. The poem laments the fate of all humans, bound by chance to thrive or die at any moment. Part I follows; it is an ode to spring, “Primo vere” (“Springtime”) and, later, “Uf dem Anger” (“On the green”), which depict both the renewed life in the green world as well as re-invigorated amorous impulses of humans. The tone of section II, “In taberna” (“In the tavern”), pretty much speaks for itself and includes the shrieking plaint of a vain swan as it roasts (but somehow has the wherewithal to sing, and in Latin!) in preparation for a feast. The final poem in this group bemoans the fleeting nature of pleasure. “Cour d’amours” (“The courts of love”) are the subject of section III; included are the beautiful soprano solo “In trutina” (“On the scales”)—whose rocking rhythms suggest the indecision of the singer as she decides between chastity and carnal love—as well as the shimmering “Dulcissime” (“Sweetest boy”), a brief though breathtaking (quite literally) tour de force of coloratura singing. The following section is not numbered, though it bears the title “Blanziflor et Helena” and contains one poem, a paean to the “most glorious virgin.” The name Blanziflor likely suggests Blanche-Fleur, AKA “white-flower,” in this case an ironic symbol of purity, in keeping with the ascription to the mother virgin. Yet, interestingly enough, the poem ends with the words “Hail, noble Venus”—so that, as might be expected, concepts of both spiritual purity and carnal beauty are evoked. Orff concludes his cantata with a repetition of the initial song, whose driving rhythm and mysterious, haunting chanting seem to set the entire cantata in an ancient, pre-modern moment.
Orff’s work contains little or no polyphony or harmonic complexity. Yet its movements are full of excitingly irregular and changing meters, with frequent, dramatic caesurae. Orff had clearly learned from his involvement with the music of Stravinsky, and his debt to the dramatic potential of Monteverdi opera seems similarly clear.
Despite a very negative review from a prominent German reviewer of the time—who labelled the work “degenerate,” a popularly trite appraisal by this time in history, and a “mistaken return to primitive elements of instrumentalism and a foreign emphasis on rhythmic formulae”--the German audiences loved the cantata, and Carmina Burana has become a standard work in orchestral and choral repertoires ever since.