Into the Score: Orff’s Carmina Burana

Carmina is a magnificent piece of music, but surely part of its magic of Carmina stems from the pure pleasure of its text—fluid with the beautiful vowels of Latin, dancing in double rhyme (it’s most likely that the poems were sung, though music notation doesn’t survive)—and fully alive with the wit, personality, and emotions of its creators. The untitled 13th-century manuscript the poems of Carmina came from is the richest collected source of poetry created by the goliards—groups of 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. (Primogeniture, or the passing of all inheritance to the first born son, meant that there were many second- and third-born sons in the Middle Ages who went to the Church and the Academy, whether or not they were cut out for monastic or scholastic life). The goliards’ facility with language enlivens all of the poems of Carmina. The poems are in Medieval Latin, Germanic Latin, Middle-High German, Old French, Provençal, and some of the pieces are even “macaronic,” meaning they are a jumble of different languages. Most of them rhyme and have an irresistibly sing-song quality (they are a delight to recite!)

In the 1880s John Symonds created Wine, Women, and Song—the first English translation of the manuscript, which Orff would encounter sixty years later. His publication includes an introductory essay, in which he sheds light on who the goliards were: Who were these Wandering Students, so often mentioned, and of whom nothing has been as yet related? As their name implies, they were men, and for the most part young men, travelling from university to university in search of knowledge. Far from their homes, without responsibilities, light of purse and light of heart, careless and pleasure-seeking, they ran a free, disreputable course, frequenting taverns at least as much as lecture-rooms, more capable of pronouncing judgment upon wine or women than upon a problem of divinity or logic. The conditions of medieval learning made it necessary to study different sciences in different parts of Europe; and a fixed habit of unrest, which seems to have pervaded society after the period of the Crusades, encouraged vagabondage in all classes. The extent to which travelling was carried in the Middle Ages for purposes of pilgrimage and commerce, out of pure curiosity or love of knowledge, for the bettering of trade in handicrafts or for self-improvement in the sciences, has only of late years been estimated at a just calculation. "The scholars," wrote a monk of Froidmont in the twelfth century, "are wont to roam around the world and visit all its cities, till much learning makes them mad; for in Paris they seek liberal arts, in Orleans authors, at Salerno gallipots, at Toledo demons, and in no place decent manners.

Symonds’ preface also notes how these learned poets were able to co-opt the new style of poetry created in the Church for their own works: The services and music of the Church introduced new systems of prosody. Rhymes, both single and double, were added to the verse; and the extraordinary flexibility of medieval Latin—that sonorous instrument of varied rhetoric used by Augustine in the prose of the Confessions, and gifted with poetic inspiration in such hymns as the Dies Irae or the Stabat Mater—rendered this new vehicle of literary utterance adequate to all the tasks imposed on it by piety and metaphysics. The hymns of the Church and the secular songs composed for music in this base Latin took a great variety of rhythmic forms. It is clear that vocal melody controlled their movement; and one fixed element in all these compositions was rhyme.

The portentous “O Fortuna” bookends the work. In between, Orff, with the help of a Latin scholar named Michael Hoffman, divided their selected poems into three sections. The first is “Spring.” Many of the poetry in the 13th-century manuscript describe nature and its delights. Symonds notes: “As a background to their love-songs we always find the woods and fields of May, abundant flowers and gushing rivulets, lime-trees and olive-trees, through which soft winds are blowing. There are rose-bowers and nightingales; fauns, nymphs, and satyrs dancing. The poems selected for Carmina herald the beauty and warmth of spring—surely welcome to men without a home to call their own.

The second section of Carmina is “In the Tavern.” The poets toast the delights of the tavern, mock clergymen, and imagine the lament of a roasting swan, while subtly skewering the simony and greed of the ever-powerful church they had forsaken. Symonds estimation of these poems is colorful: The drinking-songs are equally spontaneous and fresh. Anacreon pales before the brilliancy of the Archipoeta when wine is in his veins, and the fountain of the Bacchic chant swells with gushes of strongly emphasised bold double rhymes, each throbbing like a man's firm stroke upon the strings of lyres. A fine audacity breathes through the praises of the wine-god, sometimes rising to lyric rapture, sometimes sinking to parody and innuendo, but always carrying the bard on rolling wheels along the paths of song. The reality of the inspiration is indubitable. These Bacchanalian choruses have been indited in the tavern, with a crowd of topers round the poet, with the rattle of the dice-box ringing in his ears, and with the facile maidens of his volatile amours draining the wine-cup at his elbow.

The third section, Cour d’amour (In the Court of Love). These movements trace the gradual seduction of a young woman in a red dress. The poet’s ardor heats up as he pursues her, reaching its apex in the 22nd movement: “Come my pretty, I am dying! Oh! Oh!” She obliges, exclaiming, in the subsequent movement: “Sweetest one! Ah! I give myself to you totally!” This consummation ushers in the most exultant music of the cantata. 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!”

The poems may be well over 700 years old, but their themes, and their depictions of the highs and lows of life, are timeless.

Orff’s music is extremely effective precisely because it is unabashedly straightforward and repetitive. While you may not walk away from a performance humming a gorgeous tune, or feeling as though you’ve followed the development of an idea through an entire movement of a symphony, you most certainly will have spent some time tapping your toes. Powered by rank upon rank of soldiering beats, marching along in insistent ostinatos (insistent, repeated patterns), rhythm vanquishes melody to proclaim itself the primary musical parameter. Orff believed rhythm to be the most fundamental human expression, and his score for Carmina puts rhythm into the body and mind of each performer. In many movements, 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. Changes of meter, dynamic, and range lend the music an athletic, gymnastic quality. Where movements repeat big sections of music almost exactly, Orff will specify that the tempo increases. 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. The effect of all of these musical aspects, taken together, can be overwhelming. And, I suppose, that’s precisely the point: Orff’s music manifests the intensity of feeling bubbling between the lines of its poetry.

Carmina elicits a rather primordial emotional response. Its clamor and pulse can 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.