Carmina Burana (Orff)

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The cover of the score to Carmina Burana showing the Wheel of Fortuna
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The cover of the score to Carmina Burana showing the Wheel of Fortuna

Carmina Burana is a scenic cantata composed by Carl Orff between 1935 and 1936. It is based on 24 of the poems found in the medieval collection Carmina Burana. Its full Latin title is Carmina Burana: Cantiones profanae cantoribus et choris cantandae comitantibus instrumentis atque imaginibus magicis ("Songs of Beuern: Secular songs for singers and choruses to be sung together with instruments and magic images.") Carmina Burana is part of Trionfi, the musical triptych that also includes the cantata Catulli Carmina and Trionfo di Afrodite. The best-known movement is the bracketing "O Fortuna" chorus that opens and closes the piece.

Contents

[edit] Text

Main article: Carmina Burana

Orff first encountered the text in John Addington Symonds's 1884 publication, Wine, Women, and Song, which included English translations of 46 poems from the collection. Michel Hofmann, a young law student and Latin and Greek enthusiast, assisted Orff in the selection and organization of 24 of these poems into a libretto including both Latin and Middle High German verse. The selection covers a wide range of secular topics, as familiar in the 13th century as they are in the 21st century: the fickleness of fortune and wealth, the ephemeral nature of life, the joy of the return of Spring, and the pleasures and perils of drinking, gluttony, gambling and lust.

[edit] Orchestration

[edit] Vocal elements

[edit] Instrumental elements

[edit] Structure

Carmina Burana is structured into five major sections each of which contains several individual movements. Orff indicates attacca markings between all the movements within each scene.

  • Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi [Fortuna, Empress of the World]
  • Primo vere [Spring] - includes the internal scene Uf dem Anger [In the Meadow]
  • In Taberna [In the Tavern]
  • Cours d'amours [Court of Love]
  • Blanziflor et Helena [Blanziflor and Helena]

Much of the compositional structure is based on the idea of the turning Fortuna Wheel. The drawing of the wheel found on the first page of the Burana Codex includes four phrases around the outside of the wheel:

"Regno, Regnavi, Sum sine regno, Regnabo" [I reign, I reigned, I am without reign, I shall reign]

Within each scene, and sometimes within a single movement, the wheel of fortune turns, joy turning to bitterness, and hope turning to grief. O Fortuna, the first poem in the Schmeller edition, completes this circle, forming a compositional frame for the work by consisting of both the opening and closing movements.

[edit] Musical style

Orff's style demonstrates a desire for directness of speech and of access. Carmina Burana contains little or no development in the classical sense, and polyphony is also conspicuously absent. Carmina Burana avoids overt harmonic and rhythmic complexities, a fact which draws scorn on an aesthetic level from many musicians, although considering the complicated compositional techniques favored by almost all other renowned composers of the day, the work may also be considered in this respect extremely bold.

Orff was influenced melodically by late Renaissance and early Baroque models including William Byrd and Claudio Monteverdi. It is a common misconception that Orff based the melodies of Carmina Burana on neumeatic melodies; no such assigned melodies can be found in the Burana Codex. His shimmering orchestration shows a deference to Stravinsky.

Rhythm for Orff, as for Stravinsky, is often the primary musical element. Overall, it sounds rhythmically straightforward and simple, but the meter will change freely from one measure to the next. While the rhythmic arc in a section is taken as a whole, a measure of five may be followed by one of seven, to one of four, and so on, often with caesura marked between them. These constant rhythmic changes combined with the caesura create a very "conversational" feel -- so much so that the rhythmic complexities of the piece are often overlooked.

[edit] Staging

Orff developed a dramatic concept called "Theatrum Mundi" in which music, movement, and speech were inseparable. Babcock writes that "Orff's artistic formula limited the music in that every musical moment was to be connected with an action on stage. It is here that modern performances of Carmina Burana fall short of Orff's intentions."

Although Carmina Burana was intended as a staged work involving dance, choreography, visual design and other stage action, the piece is now usually performed in concert halls as a cantata. Notable exceptions include recent performances with live-footage projections and the Minnesota Dance Theatre; performances with the Missouri State Ballet and the Kansas City Symphony and Chorus, the Dance Alive ballet and University of Florida Chorus in Gainesville Florida, the Lesbian/Gay Chorus of San Francisco with the Peninsula Ballet Theatre and Ragazzi Boy Choir, a one hour ballet performance by the University of Oklahoma,[1] as well as a performance featuring the Boise State University Orchestra, the Boise Master Choral, and Ballet Idaho.

[edit] Reception

Carmina Burana was first staged in Frankfurt by the Frankfurt Opera on June 8, 1937 (Conductor: Bertil Wetzelsberger, Choir Cäcilienchor, staging by Otto Wälterlin and sets and costumes by Ludwig Sievert). Shortly after the greatly successful premiere, Orff wrote the following letter to his publisher, Schott Music:

"You may now destroy everything I have written till now and that you unfortunately published. With the Carmina Burana my collected works begin"[verification needed]

Several performances were repeated elsewhere in Germany, and though the Nazi bureaucracy was at first nervous about the erotic tone of the some of the poems,[verification needed] they eventually embraced it and it became the most famous piece of music composed in Nazi Germany.[citation needed] The popularity of the work continued to rise after the war, and by the 1960s Carmina Burana was well established as part of the international classic repertory.

Alex Ross writes: "[Although Orff had collaborated with the Nazis] the music itself commits no sins simply by being and remaining popular. That “Carmina Burana” has appeared in hundreds of films and television commercials is proof that it contains no diabolical message, indeed that it contains no message whatsoever."[1]

In retrospect the desire he expressed in the letter to his publisher has by and large been fulfilled: No other composition of his approaches its renown as evidenced in both pop culture's appropriation of O Fortuna and the classical world's persistent programming and recording of the work. In the United States, Carmina Burana represents one of the few box office certainties in 20th-century music.

[edit] Carmina Burana in pop culture

The music of Carmina Burana, particularly the famous "O Fortuna" movement, appears in several movies and has been featured in numerous commercials and covered and sampled by many bands.

"O Fortuna" was first introduced to mainstream media in John Boorman's 1981 film Excalibur. It enjoyed tremendous popularity among the public following the movie's release and was for a time thereafter frequently incorporated into various cinematic and musical works for dramatic effect (a technique that has since become cliched and consequently is often parodied). Since its debut in Excalibur, "O Fortuna" has been featured in such diverse films as Conan the Barbarian, The Doors, Glory and Natural Born Killers, as well as in many television commercials such as the barbarian raider advertisements for Capital One credit cards, and in the United Kingdom in a long running TV advertising campaign for Old Spice aftershave - predating its appearance in Excalibur by four years (the advertisements began in 1977). Other examples include:

[edit] O Fortuna

[edit] Other movements

[edit] Notable recordings

[edit] References

  • Steinberg, Michael. "Carl Orff: Carmina Burana." Choral Masterworks: A Listener's Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, 230-242.
  • Babcock, Jonathan. "Carl Orff's Carmina Burana: A Fresh Approach to the Work's Performance Practice." Choral Journal 45, no. 11 (May 2006): 26-40.

[edit] External links

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