Katalog als PDF herunterladen - Schott Music

The significance of “Carmina Burana”, the key-work in the music
of Carl Orff, is not merely that of a final break-through regarding the
composer’s personality but also a break-through in an international
recognition which led, after 1945, to spectacularly rapid successes,
unparalleled since then, in every country of the musical world – comparable
only to those of “Der Rosenkavalier” by Richard Strauss
(1911), Stravinsky’s three early ballets (“Firebird”, “Petruschka” and
“Sacre du Printemps” between 1910 and 1913), Alban Berg’s
“Wozzeck” (1925) and the “Bolero” by Ravel (1928). Producers
and choreographers the world over were particularly inspired by
“Carmina burana” to create new interpretations because the elements
of dance, mime and theatre were as strikingly effective in this
work as the music itself. “The more fundamental and simple the
statement, the more immediate and powerful its effect” is a maxim
proclaiming Orff’s artistic conviction which governed every one of
his works written after “Carmina Burana” – even where they were
thematically as far apart as, on the one hand, the fairy-tale plays “Der
Mond” and “Die Kluge”, as well as the Bavarian story “Die
Bernauerin”, and on the other the Greek trilogy “Antigonae”,
“Oedipus der Tyrann”, “Prometheus”, and the second “Trittico
teatrale” with the title “Trionfi” consisting of “Carmina Burana”,
“Catulli Carmina” and “Trionfo di Afrodite”. These are the two
spheres in which Orff’s creative personality has always been at home:
the vigorous and earthy vitality from just north of the Alps together
with the elemental strength of his theatre-orientated vision, and
Mediterranean antiquity which, Orff was convinced, had retained
over several thousand years the unbroken spiritual power of its
humanist image. The mystery play “De temporum fine comoedia”,
his last work for the stage first performed at the 1972 Salzburg Festival,
opens the theatre to transcendental and metaphysical ideas.
“In everything”, Orff said, “I am concerned in the end not with
musical but with spiritual arguments.” Indeed, every realized vision
in his powerfully conceived works for the stage serves this purpose.
He revives the universal theatre by creating a characteristic sound
picture embracing, as Ernst Laaff has pointed out, “all the early
forms of our music making”, but also by using language creatively in
associations and structures of the most diverse forms – the Greek
tragedy and the Latin comedy, the medieval mystery plays and
improvisations, the homage-intermezzi in the manner of the Renaissance,
the Baroque opera, the peasant theatre and the folklore of the
Alpine countries, and finally Shakespeare who also plays a significant
part in this varied and colourful theatre landscape because Orff
wrote his own version with music of the “Midsummer Night’s
Dream”. The contemporary theatre seems constantly restless and
beset by countless experiments and doubts about its artistic and
social validity, if not by suggestions to liquidate it altogether. In
contrast Orff’s theatre represents a field of tranquility of a very
personal kind, that is to say, of a never waning spiritual intensity, and
of a powerful image of humanity.
8