On Carl Orff's Carmina Burana

In Frankfurt, Germany, more than eighty years ago—June 8, 1937—a cantata that would become one of the most beloved and enduring of the choral masterworks was seen and heard for the first time: Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana: Cantiones profanæ cantoribus et choris cantandæ comitantibus instrumentis atque imaginibus magicis (“Songs of Beuern: Secular songs for singers and choruses to be sung together with instruments and magic images”). That mouthful of a title reveals several things about Carmina’s origins and its composer’s intent. “Beuern” refers to the Benedictine monastery in Bavaria where, in 1803, a collection of thirteenth-century songs and poems was uncovered. Carl Orff discovered a version of that collection in a second-hand bookstore, within a volume bearing the tawdry title Wine, Women, and Song. He was instantly entranced:

I obtained the book on Maundy Thursday 1934, a memorable day for me. Right when I opened it, on the very first page, I found the long-famous illustration of “Fortune with the Wheel,” and under it the lines: “O Fortuna velut Luna statu variabilis.” The picture and the words took hold of me. Although I was, in the beginning, only acquainted with the broad outlines of the contents of the poetry collection, a new work, a stage work with choruses for singing and dancing, simply following the pictures and text, sprang to life immediately in my mind. That very day I had sketched the first chorus. After a sleepless night during which I nearly lost myself in the voluminous poetry collection, a second chorus, “Fortune plango vulnera,” was finished, and on Easter morning, a third, “Ecce gratum,” was put on paper.

With the help of a Latin scholar named Michael Hoffman, Orff chose twenty-four poems from the collection and grouped them into three scenes: Spring, In the Tavern, and The Court of Love. The authors of these poems were likely itinerant scholars and defrocked priests—learned, literary men who, for whatever reason, fell out with the academic and religious institutions of medieval Europe and made a living entertaining hosts (and each other) with their too-clever words and catchy rhymes. Their poems herald the beauty and warmth of spring—surely welcome to men without a home to call their own. They toast the delights of the tavern, mocking clergymen, imagining the lament of a roasting swan, while subtly skewering the simony and greed of the ever-powerful church they had forsaken. They revel in the intrigue of courtly love—the longing for a chaste and typically unattainable lady—that animated the noble courts that provided the men a few nights’ stay. Taken as a whole, these poems reflect how Fortune’s whims hold sway over life’s delights and challenges.

Orff set out to vivify the texts through both song and “magic images.” At the school of dance and gymnastics that he founded with Dorothee Günther, dancers were expected to improvise music for their movement, and instrumentalists created movements for their melodies. In Orff’s art, as in some African cultures where there aren’t separate words for “music” and “dance,” the two were essentially interchangeable. Orff’s choice of medieval texts complemented his innate inclination toward older music.

Turning away from the urbane iconoclasm of Weimar Germany and the intellectualism of composers like Schoenberg, Orff sought a more elemental, primal music inspired by nature and earlier musical models. At the Günther School, students played large, simplified percussion instruments, which allowed them to use their bodies to develop complex rhythmic ideas from simple melodic materials. For his own performances as conductor of the Munich Bach Society and other organizations, Orff arranged the music of Monteverdi and created staged versions of works by Schütz and Bach. He was a student of medieval music, too: The contours of medieval plainchant inform the choral music in Carmina’s third movement (“Varies leta facies”) and the baritone’s first utterance (“Omnia sol temperat”) in the fourth. The jaunty mixed meter of the sixth movement, “Tanz,” (“Dance”) was inspired by medieval Bavarian dance.

Unsurprisingly, Orff’s music begs for movement. Powered by rank upon rank of soldiering beats, marching along in insistent ostinatos, rhythm vanquishes melody to proclaim itself the primary musical parameter. A near-constant barrage of sharp accents and snappy staccatos adds crispness and angularity to the musical surface. Unlike much of nineteenth and early twentieth-century choral repertoire, Carmina offers almost no harmonic narrative; the movements remain steadfastly in one key, never daring to modulate to other tonal realms. Indeed, the choral score for Carmina looks like few others in the literature. It’s as though Orff deliberately compensated for the conspicuous lack of flats and sharps by adorning nearly every note with a diacritic crown of articulation. The choir, of course, isn’t the only component of Carmina responsible for the rhythm and accents, and it plays hardly any role in creating its idiosyncratic crash and sparkle. For that, Orff’s score calls for no fewer than three glockenspiels, five timpani, drums of all sizes, gong, chimes, and the most clangy and clackety instruments of the percussion section: triangle, sleigh bells, and castanets.

Carl Orff’s masterpiece produces a powerful effect in the concert hall. Sometimes at a classical performance we bear witness to a soloist’s self-reflective reverie with her instrument, deriving pleasure from our moment of access to that intimate, interior world. At other times we sit in awe as a composer’s creation raises universal, profound questions or conveys majesty. But Carmina elicits an emotional response of a more primordial type. Its clamor and pulse sweep us into communal ecstasy.

It’s no wonder, then, that few choral pieces have been used so much outside the concert hall context. Carmina’s topics—springtime sunshine, tipsy conviviality, stirring loins—are innocent enough. But its effects—unification through rhythm, a sense of triumphalism—harness powerful potential. The piece was written in a time when odious nationalist regimes were gaining power in Europe. Though Orff claimed that the Nazis proscribed Carmina due to its Latin text, communal “European” sensibility, and “jazzy atmosphere,” some Nazis embraced the work and at least one appreciated the rhythms’ evocation of “the stamping columns of the Third Reich.” Carmina’s first performance at Milan’s La Scala was seen as a showpiece for fascist values. In more recent times, Carmina Burana has been co-opted in the commercial realm. Countless solo artists and bands have sampled Orff’s music. Film and television soundtracks throb with its rhythms. Ad campaigns use it to sell everything from SUVs to beer. Sports franchises blast “O Fortuna” when their players take the field or court. They lean on these familiar sounds to signal that their protagonists face an epic battle with fate.

Indeed, despite its familiarity, the famous “O Fortuna” is always arresting. This is never more the case when it returns at the end of the work. Orff saves his richest, most exulted music for the penultimate movement. Having followed the courtship and seduction gradually unfolding between baritone and soprano, and at long last riding the rush of consummation after the soprano’s orgasmic ascent to high D, the full-throated chorus, three clanging glockenspiels, timpani, and pianos erupt in a paean to “the most beautiful one.” Their hymn-like “Aves” extol beautiful women of legend and Venus herself. But just as they reach this apex, pounded low octaves from the pianos and thundering blows from the timpani turn Fortune’s wheel once again. Soon thereafter, the last line of the famous chorus bids: “since Fate strikes down the strong man, everyone weep with me!”

By the time this broad invitation is reprised, we have reeled and rocked through the life cycle of the twenty-five movements of Orff’s cantata. We have been powerfully reminded, through word, sound, and movement, that as Fortune’s wheel inexorably spins, nothing is certain. Surely some aspects of modern life are felt just as acutely as they were in the Middle Ages. Who hasn’t sometimes felt that the world is spinning too fast, turning everything topsy-turvy, with the erstwhile “loser” suddenly exalted in triumph while the worthy are knocked flat? Yet each day we wake up and roll the dice once more. Now, as then, there are communities forced to wander and seek refuge from the caprices of cruel Fortune. Triumph and tragedy continue their uneasy coexistence. In this particular moment, Orff’s brilliant Carmina Burana enables dozens of musicians and hundreds of audience members to celebrate the triumphs—and bemoan the tribulations—of life and love. Carmina captures our tempest-tossed joys and struggles, and suggests that for all our sakes we try to steady Fortune’s hand when her wheel seems about to spin out of control.

Copyright Ryan James Brandau, 2019

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