CARL ORFF
Carmina Burana
When Carmina Burana made him an overnight celebrity
at the age of 42, Carl Orff decided to start his career over from
scratch. Immediately after the premiere in 1937, he wrote to the
Schott company in Munich, which had been 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, 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. He was
essentially self-taught. At 14, 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 17,
Orff had composed some 60 songs, which revealed the unmistakable
influence of Debussy and early Schoenberg. (He was particularly
taken with Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, and he made a
piano duet arrangement of his Chamber Symphony.) Orff's interests
were wide—he studied the great Renaissance and Baroque masters as
well as African music—and he eventually composed 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
Bertolt 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 20th-century music, although
it was Orff more than anyone who found his way as a result of the
piece. The work was wildly 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 Maundy
Thursday in 1934, when Orff's eye fell upon a collection of
medieval poems. The texts-most of them are in Latin, but a few are
Middle High German and French-celebrate springtime, love, and the
varied pleasures of a full, if self-indulgent, life. The tone,
however, is dark, even bitter. (The very first poem in the
collection—and the one Orff chose for his opening and closing
chorus—ends, "Weep with me.") These songs—Orff was not aware that
melodies for these texts also existed—had been preserved for
centuries in the Benediktbeuern monastery in the foothills of the
Bavarian Alps 30 miles south of Munich. In the early 19th 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 self-appointed censor: He omitted
the raciest numbers.) Schmeller's title, Carmina—the
accent is on the first syllable—Burana, means "songs
of Bavaria." (Beueren, the site of the Benedictine monastery, is a
variant of Bayern, the German name for Bavaria.) It was Schmeller's
edition that Orff picked up during an afternoon of fortuitous
browsing. "On opening 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').' Picture and words seized hold of me."
That very day, he sketched the opening chorus, with its great,
inexorable wheel of fate. Orff picked 24 poems, already imagining a
stage piece with chorus and dancers, and, with the help of poet
Michael Hofmann, he 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 has sometimes been criticized for popularizing 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 calls for two), the idea of giving the central
narrative role to the chorus, and the prominent use of insistent
rhythms. But where Stravinsky achieves a certain complexity of
style and idea, Orff intentionally keeps his music stripped to its
bones. In Carmina Burana, he avoids complicated
rhythm and harmony (several numbers subsist on a steady diet of two
chords), and eschews polyphony altogether. His melodies are plain
and syllabic. Occasionally, a single driving rhythmic pattern alone
keeps the music going. (Imagine the courage it must have taken to
write a pit-band oom-pah accompaniment in 1935.) Despite the
spartan recipe, Orff succeeds brilliantly because of his flair for
dramatic pacing, his ear for dazzling and seductive color, the
energy of his rhythms, and the number of catchy tunes he composed.
The result is a highly charged, expressive work of undeniable power
and immediacy—claims that can be made for few pieces of serious
music written in the 20th century.
Orff begins and ends with the wheel of fate-a massive chorus that
slowly revolves around the same relentless, unchanging pattern,
building in intensity and volume as it goes. In between these two
pillars, he writes three large chapters. The first celebrates
springtime in a series of songs and dances. The dance music is for
orchestra alone; the vocal pieces are scored for baritone solo and
various combinations of full chorus and small choir, often singing
in alternation. The second section moves indoors to the tavern-the
exclusive province of male voices and the temple of food and drink.
(The saga of the roasted swan, sung by a wailing countertenor, is a
marvel of exotic color.) In the sensuous music of the third
section, set in the courts of love, we hear the solo soprano and
the voices of children for the first time. Almost all of these nine
pieces are scored for different vocal forces, and the final
sequence of numbers is swift and dramatic. From a rowdy, swinging
chorus (No. 20, for split choirs), Orff turns to the soprano, who
is lost in thought as she vacillates between chastity and physical
love (a measured monologue, set in the soprano's lowest range).
Encouraged by the baritone and choruses, she makes her choice,
suddenly soaring to the highest reaches of the soprano voice. The
music erupts in a magnificent hymn of praise ("Noble Venus, hail"),
and the circle starts over as the wheel of fate begins to spin once
again.