CARMINA BURANA - The Chicago Bar Association

CBA SYMPHONY & CHORUS OFFICIAL PROGRAM
12 | CBA SYMPHONY & CHORUS
COmmEnTS
By Phillip Huscher
CARL ORFF
Born July 10, 1895, Munich, Bavaria.
Died March 29, 1982, Munich, Bavaria.
Carmina burana
Orff composed Carmina burana in 1935 to 1936.
The work was first performed in a staged production
at the Frankfurt Opera on June 8, 1937.
The score calls for soprano, tenor, and baritone
solos; a large mixed chorus; a small mixed
chorus; a children’s chorus; and an orchestra
consisting of three flutes and two piccolos,
three oboes and english horn, three clarinets,
E-flat clarinet and bass clarinet, two bassoons
and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets,
three trombones and 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. Performance time is
approximately sixty-one minutes.
When Carmina burana made him an overnight
celebrity at the age of forty-two, Carl Orff decided
to start his career over from scratch. Immediately
after the premiere in 1937 he wrote to the Schott
company in Munich, his publisher for a full decade:
“Everything I have written to date, and which you
have, unfortunately, printed, can be destroyed. With
Carmina burana my collected works begin.”
Before the premiere of Carmina burana in 1937,
Orff’s career had proceeded nicely, if routinely, on
track. His infatuation with music began at an early
age—he took music lessons and composed songs
as a young child—and at the age of four he became
enchanted with the theater during a traditional
Punch and Judy show. At fourteen he heard his first
opera, Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman; it started an
avalanche, as Orff later recalled. The young composer’s
grandfather kept a notebook in which he
recorded the progress of Carl’s musical education:
Wagner’s entire Ring cycle and Tristan and Isolde,
the principal Mozart operas, Strauss’s Salome and
Elektra. By the age of seventeen, Orff had composed
some sixty songs, which revealed the unmistakable
influence of Debussy and early Schoenberg. (He was
particularly taken with Schoenberg’s Five Pieces
for Orchestra.) Orff’s interests were wide and he
eventually wrote music in a number of forms. The
catalog he asked Schott to destroy in 1937 included
an operatic treatment of the Japanese play Terakoya,
a symphony based on the poetry of Maurice
Maeterlinck, and choral settings of texts by Franz
Werfel (Orff’s favorite writer) and Bertold Brecht.
Carmina burana marked a shift in direction. It was
Orff’s first attempt at total theater—a combination
of music, word, movement, and visual spectacle—
and his earliest essay in a potent and accessible
musical style designed to engage listeners who
had lost their way in the complexities of twentiethcentury
music, although it was Orff more than
anyone who found his way as a result of the piece.
The work was immensely popular at once and its
exceptional appeal has never waned. After Carmina
burana, Orff did not tamper with his formula: he
composed virtually nothing but vocal works for the
stage—few are operas in the traditional sense—that
place a high value on simplicity of musical language
and directness of expression. At its most extreme, as
in Die Bernauerin, composed in 1947, Orff’s output
hardly resembles music as we know it: spoken word
alternates with rhythmic chanting; notated pitch is
virtually nonexistent.
The life-changing idea of composing Carmina
burana began in a rare book shop in Würzburg on
Maunday Thursday in 1935, when Orff’s eye fell
upon a collection of medieval poems. The texts, in
Latin, Middle High German, and French, celebrate
springtime, love, and the varied pleasures of a full, if
self-indulgent, life. These songs (Orff was not aware
that melodies also existed) had been preserved for
centuries in the Benedikbeuern monastery thirty
miles south of Munich in the foothills of the Bavarian
Alps. In the early nineteenth century, the manuscript
was transferred to Munich, and, in 1847, selections
were published by Johann Andreas Schmeller, the
Munich court librarian. (Schmeller also was a selfappointed
censor: he omitted the raciest numbers.)
Schmeller’s title, Carmina—with the accent on the
first syllable— burana, means “songs of Bavaria.” It
was Schmeller’s edition that Orff picked up during
an afternoon of fortuitous browsing.
“Upon turning to the first page,” Orff later remembered,
“I found the familiar image of Fortune with
her wheel, and under it the lines ‘O Fortuna velut
Luna statu variabilis . . . (O fortune, like the moon
ever-changing).’ Image and Word overtook me.”
That very day he sketched the opening chorus,
with its great, inexorable wheel of fate. Orff picked
twenty-four poems, already imagining a stage piece
with chorus and dancers, and arranged a libretto.
He composed the music quickly, in a single burst of
inspiration; visitors to his Munich apartment recall
the red-faced excitement with which he played
finished numbers for them at the piano.
The title page of Orff’s Carmina burana promises
“secular songs to be sung by singers and choruses
to the accompaniment of instruments and also
of magic pictures.” Although the premiere, at
the Frankfurt Opera House, was staged and costumed,
and magic pictures accompanied many
early performances, Carmina burana is best known
today through concerts and recordings where the
immediacy and physical excitement of Orff’s music
stand alone.
Orff’s score often has been criticized for popularizing—and,
sometimes, for cheapening—the musical
style of Stravinsky’s landmarks Oedipus rex and, in
particular, Les noces. Orff was attracted to the most
superficial aspects of those Stravinsky scores, such
as the glittering and percussive orchestral writing
(Les noces is scored for four pianos, Carmina burana