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. <strong>The</strong> work was first performed in a staged production at the Frankfurt Opera on June 8, 1937. <strong>The</strong> 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 <strong>The</strong> Flying Dutchman; it started an avalanche, as Orff later recalled. <strong>The</strong> 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. <strong>The</strong> 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. <strong>The</strong> 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. <strong>The</strong> 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. <strong>The</strong> texts, in Latin, Middle High German, and French, celebrate springtime, love, and the varied pleasures of a full, if self-indulgent, life. <strong>The</strong>se 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. <strong>The</strong> 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
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