Carmina Burana
Carl Orff (1895-1982)

[1936]

Carl Orff spent the early part of his career in his native Munich, where he founded and taught at a school that combined music and movement classes, developing techniques for music education that are still used around the world under the banner of Orff Schulwerk.

Orff’s breakthrough as a composer didn’t come until he was in his forties, with the 1937 premiere of Carmina Burana. This massive undertaking united all of the talents he had been cultivating: his sense of theatrical spectacle, his understanding of massed voices developed from conducting Bach, and the whimsy and wonder he brought to his work with children.

Orff found his source texts for Carmina Burana in a manuscript compiled between the 11th and 13th centuries. The poems and dramatic texts, mostly in Latin (with a smattering of German and French), were probably contributed by students and young clergymen who reveled in the bawdy humor and satire of church doctrine. Forgotten for centuries, it was rediscovered in a Bavarian monastery in 1803 and published in 1847.

The central preoccupation of Carmina Burana is unpredictability, as personified by the Roman goddess Fortuna and her “wheel of fortune” that places outcomes beyond individual control.

Two piccolos, three flutes, three oboes, English horn, E-flat clarinet, three clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trombones, three trumpets, tuba, timpani, percussion, two pianos, celesta, strings