Carl Orff “Carmina burana”—Cantiones profanae cantoribus et ...

Carl Orff
“Carmina burana”—Cantiones profanae cantoribus et choria cantandae comitantibus instrumentis atque imaginibus
magicis
CARL ORFF composed “Carmina burana” in 1935-36. It was first presented on June 8, 1937, at the Frankfurt
Opera, in a production staged by Otto Wälterlin, with sets and costumes by Ludwig Sievert, and Bertil Wetzelsberg
conducting.
“CARMINA BURANA” IS SCORED for soprano, tenor, and bass soloists; brief solo assignments for two tenors,
baritone, and two basses; large mixed chorus, small mixed chorus, and boys’ chorus, with an orchestra of three
flutes (two doubling piccolo), three oboes (one doubling English horn), three clarinets (one doubling E-flat clarinet
and one doubling bass clarinet), two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba,
timpani, three glockenspiels, xylophone, castanets, ratchet, small bells, triangle, antique cymbals, crash cymbals,
suspended cymbal, tam-tam, tubular bells, tambourine, snare drum, bass drum, celesta, two pianos, and strings.
Let us begin with the title. “Carmina burana”—the accent in Carmina falls on the first syllable—means “songs
from Beuern,” which is itself a variant of Bayern, the German name for Bavaria. And the rest: “Secular songs to be
sung by singers and choruses to the accompaniment of instruments and also of magic pictures.”
Beuern is Benediktbeuern, a village in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps about thirty miles south of Munich. It takes
its full name from a Benedictine monastery founded there in 733. When, as part of the arrangements in a newly
forged alliance of Elector Maximilian IV Joseph with Napoleon, the Bavarian monasteries were secularized in 1803,
the contents of their libraries went to the Court Library in Munich. In 1847, Johann Andreas Schmeller, the Court
Librarian, published a modern edition of the most remarkable of these acquisitions, an ample and richly illuminated
parchment manuscript of poems, most of them in Latin, but with a fair number in Middle High German with some
infusion of French and Greek. Schmeller invented the title Carmina burana for his edition. British and American
readers first encountered Carmina burana in 1884 when the English historian, poet, essayist, and biographer, John
Addington Symonds, published a little volume called Wine, Women, and Song, which included his fragrant
translations of forty-six poems from the collection. Orff’s vibrant cantata drew the attention of thousands more to
these treasures, and in the 1950s, when Walter Lipphardt, a German scholar, deciphered and transcribed the original
melodies and groups like the Early Music Quartet began to perform them, the circle was complete.
Orff encountered Carmina burana in Schmeller’s edition, which by the way is still in print, and enlisted the help of
the poet Michel Hofmann in organizing twenty-four of the poems into a libretto. (He did not, of course, know the
original melodies; in fact he did not even know they existed.) After the riotously successful premiere in June 1937,
he told the house of Schott, his only publisher since 1927, “Everything I have written to date, and which you have,
unfortunately, printed, can be destroyed. With Carmina burana my collected works begin.”
He was just about to turn forty-two when he wrote that letter: it had been a long, long upbeat. His family background
was military; he himself was from childhood passionately interested in music, words, and theater. He got a story
published in a children’s magazine when he was ten, at which point he was already composing music to go with the
puppet plays he had written for a theater he had built himself. He had lessons on the piano, organ, and cello, but his
parents said no to the instrument he most wanted to play, the timpani. He had some guidance in composition from
Anton Beer-Walbrunn and Hermann Zilcher, and in his middle twenties he studied for a while with Heinrich
Kaminski, a most interesting composer, but essentially he was self-taught. He composed prolifically, works, one
infers, of large ambition and originality of coloring; he worked in theaters in Munich, Mannheim, and Darmstadt as
conductor and coach; he devoted much time to the study of Renaissance and early Baroque music and also to
African music; he followed eagerly the development of modern dance, particularly the work of Mary Wigman; with

Dorothee Günther he founded a school for music, gymnastics, and dance, making imaginative and productive
contributions to music education that were eventually codified in the Orff-Schulwerk published bit by bit since 1930
in collaboration with several of his students; he made versions for the modern theater of several works by
Monteverdi and staged such works as the St. Luke Passion that was falsely ascribed to J.S. Bach and the
Resurrection Oratorio of Heinrich Schütz. His allegiance was to Expressionism: he absorbed every note of
Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra and transcribed the Chamber Symphony for piano duet, and the center of his
literary universe was Franz Werfel. And there exists a photograph from the year 1920 that presents him to us as
A most intense young man,
A soulful-eyed young man,
An ultra-poetical, super-aesthetical,
Out-of-the-way young man!
“[Orff] imposed on me the strict condition that my book should be concerned exclusively with his music; all those
biographical details in which psychologists or a sensation-hungry public might be interested, were to be
excluded....‘A life story cannot be written,’ he says, ‘until the life is completed. Anything else is deceit and selfdeception.’
” Thus Andreas Liess in the “Prelude” to his monograph on the composer. Orff was consistent in his
quest for privacy; we have, therefore, no precise knowledge of just what happened in 1935 on the road to Damascus
when Orff came across Carmina burana and saw what manner of music he had to invent for these poems. The
Pauline metaphor is strong, but hardly too strong for Orff’s extreme revulsion from his previous compositional
concerns to the audacious simplicities of Carmina burana. And it was a conversion for life. The “collected works”
that begin with Carmina burana, almost all for voices and the largest part of them written for the stage, are anything
other than unvaried in substance, intent, and effect, but they all stand upon the common principle that directness of
speech and of access are paramount. 1
One might say that Carmina burana represents, in Orff’s life, integration as well as revolution. The ideal of a
drastically direct physicality in music was already central in his educational endeavors, and he had explored the
possibilities of medieval theater in his adaptation of the St. Luke Passion. He discovered in himself a remarkable gift
for writing tunes that sound as though they had always been there. He leaned heavily on Stravinsky (Les Noces and
Oedipus Rex are the principal source works), though removing the wit and the delight in the unpredictable that make
Stravinsky Stravinsky. Since boyhood, when he had written music for his puppet theater for a combination of piano,
violin, zither, glockenspiel, and the kitchen stove, he had always enjoyed the coloristic aspects of composition and
he scored Carmina burana with a sure hand. 2 Here too—and often in later years—he looks to Stravinsky, especially
to the pianos and percussion of Les Noces; however, Stravinsky’s brilliant and imaginative economy is translated
into a lavish generosity with sonorities and confidently brought-off effects, rather as though Orff had devised a “Les
Noces Coloring Book.”
He had found a winning combination. Carmina burana was an instant popular success, and, though its international
circulation had to wait until after World War II, it has kept its hold on audiences. And undeniably, the constellation
of esthetic and historical considerations that, so to speak, “place” Carmina burana—its popularity and the courting
of that popularity in part by the avoidance of complexities in harmony and rhythm (not to mention the absence of
polyphony), also that this is the music of a man who found Germany in 1936 (and thereafter) a comfortable place to
work—has made it a controversial piece. 3 But however suspect one might find the composer’s ends and means, it is
impossible to deny his skill in pacing and design, the catchiness of his tunes (so consonant with the blunt endrhymes
in the poems), and the splendid way in which everything “sounds.” Had Orff ever felt called upon to defend
his one-dimensional masterpiece, he might have repeated his answer to a question about his preference for “old
material” as subjects of his stage works: “I do not feel it to be old, only valid. The dated elements are lost and the
spiritual strength remains.”

Orff was immediately captivated by “O Fortuna,/velut Luna” (“O Fortune, like the moon”), the first poem in
Carmina burana and its accompanying Wheel of Fortune miniature (see manuscript image on page 35). 4 He saw this
bitter meditation as a strong frame, inside which he groups poems in three chapters:
I. In Springtime and On the Green (pastoral and genre poems)
II. In the Tavern
III. -The Court of Love, concluding with the ecstatic address to Blanziflor (Blanchefleur) and Helena
O Fortuna is a massive structural pillar—a brief exordium, then a crescendo and acceleration built over nearly one
hundred measures, all of them glued to the insistent tonic D. Fortune plango vulnera, with its chantlike beginning, is
a variant on a smaller scale of the opening chorus.
The three spring poems introduce brighter colors, though the first two, Veris leta facies and Omnia sol temperat,
continue with melodies close to chant. With Ecce gratum, Orff completes the transformation of atmosphere by
moving into the major mode.
The sequence on the green begins with a lively dance for the orchestra alone: the harmony sticks to tonic and
dominant, as after all it does virtually throughout the cantata, but Orff allows himself delightful metrical
dislocations. Floret silva alternates the big and small choruses: the sly slurs on “meus amicus” are charming, as is the
picture of the lover riding off into the distance (in Latin, “hinc equitavit,” and in German, “der ist geritten hinnen”).
Another instrumental dance—Orff makes it andante poco esitante—separates the softly curved Chramer, gip die
varwe mir, the song of the girl out to buy some makeup, from the uninhibited Swaz hie gat umbe. Were diu werlt
alle min, in which erotic ambition extends to nothing less than possession of the Queen of England (the energetic
Eleanor of Provence, wife of Henry III), is enclosed in fanfares and ends with an exultant shout.
Orff regards the tavern as a male preserve and he begins with an unbridled setting for baritone solo of Estuans
interius. Then comes one of the most famous and original pieces in Carmina burana, Olim lacus colueram (the
Lament of the Roast Swan). 5 It is the bassoon that initiates the pitiful keening, which is then carried on by a tenor
with the sympathetic assistance of piccolo, E-flat clarinet, and muted trumpet; flutes, violas, a muted trombone, and
assorted percussion do musical goose (swan?)-flesh. The Abbot of Cockaigne, who has been tanking up on more
than just roast swan, lurches forward to speak his fierce little credo, whereupon the whole male chorus plunges into
its whirling catalogue of toasts and drinkers. 6
After a pause for breath, we enter the Cour d’amours and go to the delicate sound of flutes and soprano voices
(including those of a boys’ chorus). In Dies, nox et omnia, the baritone bemoans his lovelorn state with enormous
pathos (“tender but always exaggerated” is Orff’s direction to him) and in falsetto flourishes that send him clear to
high B. In Stetit puella, the soprano sets before us the picture of the girl in the red dress with her irresistible erotic
radiance. Si puer cum puellula, which Symonds aptly titles A Poem of Privacy, is set for a chattering, leering sextet
of male voices. Veni, veni, venias is a love song full of bird noises. For In trutina, the song of the girl who finds it
after all not so very difficult to choose between “lascivus amor” and “pudicitia,” the soprano is held to her most
seductive low register, projected against a softly pulsating accompaniment. It is the loveliest lyric inspiration in the
Carmina. The baritone and chorus heat things up still more in the restless and vigorous Tempus est iocundum, and
then, in a wonderful musical and dramatic stroke, the girl fulfills the promise of In trutina: Dulcissime soars “con
abbandono,” and to the very highest reaches of the soprano’s voice. The brief but sonorous address to Blanziflor et
Helena makes a bridge to the reprise of the Fortuna chorus (about whose ringing close few of us would guess that
the words are an exhortation, “mecum omnes plangite!”—”Come, all, and weep with me!”).
Michael Steinberg