“ Carmina Burana,” asserts musicologist Richard Taruskin, “abounds in out-and-out plagiarisms from Les Noces.” Many detractors point to Orff’s close “borrowings” from Igor Stravinsky, especially from his ballet, Les Noces. Indeed, Burana has been the whipping boy of many a music critic, who sees in its simple harmonies, lack of musical development, and reliance on powerful rhythm the simplistic creation of a second-rate composer. Though he lived until 1982 and enjoyed some esteem in his later life as both a composer and musical educator, Orff’s unsavory personal history surely has made difficult an impartial evaluation of his qualities as a musician. After the war, Orff again revealed his true self-interested character in falsely painting himself as a co-founder of the White Rose.
Arrested in 1943 by the Gestapo, Huber found no friend in Orff, who quickly dissociated himself from his collaborator. In crafting his libretto, Orff was aided by Kurt Huber, a founder of the German White Rose resistance movement, which operated covertly in its opposition to Nazism.
“The Wheel of Fortune,” from The Codex Burana A Nazi newspaper proclaimed that Burana was “the kind of clear, stormy, and yet always disciplined music that our time requires.” The Nazi authorities, first skeptical of its hedonistic nature, came to embrace it as a useful propaganda tool, which celebrated the human spirit and which, in drawing on medieval Latin poetry, helped give credence to the Nazi claim that Germany represented the true flowering of Western culture.
Orff’s “scenic cantata” was premiered on June 8, 1937, and was instantly popular. That I may loose the chains of her virginity. May God grant, may the Gods grant what I have in mind: In the final section, “The Court of Love,” (“Circa Mea Pectora”/”In My Heart”), a man cries out in desire for his lover: My soul is dead, so I shall look after the flesh.Īt the conclusion of this section, there is a rousing chorus of drinkers (“In Taberna Quando Sumus”/”When We are at the Tavern”), who sing:Īnd may their names not be written in the book of the righteous. I am eager for the pleasures of the flesh, more than for salvation, The first song of the section “In the Tavern” is called “Estuans Interius” (“Burning Inside”), and the soloist sings: Several of the poems explicitly mock the Christian focus on the afterlife and Christian virtues, especially those of chastity and temperance. Indeed, this blatantly anti-Christian theme of embracing the fleeting joys of the flesh of the present world pervades the poems that make up Carmina Burana. I will be obedient to you because of the pleasures you afford. Later in the same section, in the song, “Chramer, gip die varwe mir” (“Shopkeeper, give me color”), a group of women entreat a monger to sell them blush so as to seduce the men of the town: They glory and rejoice in honeyed sweetness who strive to make use of Cupid’s prize Īt Venus’ command let us glory and rejoice in being Paris’ equals. Now melts and disappears ice, snow and the rest, winter flees,Ī wretched soul is he who does not live or lust under summer’s rule. At the end of the first section, the chorus rejoices in the end of winter and the pleasures that spring brings: It includes driving choruses, jaunty dances, and even sweet solos by the soprano.īookended by the famed and foreboding chorus, “Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi’ (“Fortune, Empress of the World”), Carmina Burana is divided into three main sections: “Primo Vere” (“In Spring”) “In Taberna” (“In the Tavern”) and “Cours d’amour” (“The Court of Love”). There is a drunken Abbott, a young virgin who cries out in ecstasy upon giving into the temptations of the flesh, and a chorus of libidinous youths who chant “Oh! Oh! Oh! I am bursting out all over!” The hour-long piece is arranged for a large orchestra, two mixed choruses (of men and women), a boys’ choir, and three soloists (soprano, tenor, and baritone). The manuscript contains 320 poems, set by some fifteen poets, some of whose names are unknown in 1934, Orff selected twenty-four of these and crafted them into a racy libretto, which sings of the vagaries of Fortune and celebrates the pleasures of lust, drinking, and gluttony. Composed by the German Orff, Carmina Burana (meaning “Songs from Beuern”) was based on a medieval manuscript, the “Codex Buranus,” discovered in 1803 in a monastery in Benediktbeuern, Bavaria.
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