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Carmina Burana (Carl Orff 1895-1982)
Carmina Burana is a scenic Cantata composed by Carl Orff in 1935-1936. Its full Latin title is Carmina Burana: Cantiones profanae cantoribus et choris cantandae comitantibus instrumentis atque imaginibus magicis, or "Songs of Beuern: Secular songs for singers and choruses to be sung together with instruments and magic images". Carmina Burana is part of Trionfi the musical triptych that also includes the cantata Catulli Carmina and Trionfo di Afrodite.
Orff's work is based upon 24 poems from a collection of mediaeval poetry. The name Carmina Burana means literally “Songs of Beuern". Beuern here refers specifically to the Benediktbeuern Abbey where the original manuscript was found.
Orff first encountered these texts in John Addington Symond's 1884 publication, Wine, Women, and Song, which included English translations of 46 poems from the collection. Michel Hofmann, a young law student and Latin and Greek enthusiast, assisted Orff in the selection and organization of 24 of these poems into a libretto.
This libretto includes thirteenth century poems in both Latin and Middle High German verse. It covers a wide range of secular topics, as familiar in the 13th Century as they are in the 21st century: the fickleness of fortune and wealth, the ephemeral nature of life, the joy of the return of Spring, and the pleasures of drinking, gluttony, gambling and lust.
Carmina Burana is structured into five major sections each of which contains several individual movements. Orff indicates attacca markings between all the movements within each scene.
- Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi [Fortuna, Empress of the World]
- Primo vere [Spring] - includes the internal scene Uf dem Anger [In the Meadow]
- In Taberna [In the Tavern]
- Cours d'amours [Court of Love]
- Blanziflor et Helena [Blanziflor and Helena]
The orchestration consists of soprano, tenor and baritone soloists, large mixed choir, chamber choir, children's choir and large orchestra.
Much of the compositional structure is based on the idea of the turning Fortuna Wheel. The drawing of the wheel found on the first page of the Burana Codex includes four phrases around the outside of the wheel:
"Regno, Regnavi, Tum fine regno, Regnabo"
[I reign, I reigned, My reign is finished, I shall reign]
Within each scene, and sometimes within a single movement, the wheel of fortune turns, joy turning to bitterness and hope turning to grief. The best-known movement, O Fortuna, is the first poem in the Schmeller edition. It completes the circle, forming a compositional frame for the work by consisting of both the opening and closing movements of the piece.
Orff's musical style demonstrates a desire for directness of speech and of access. Carmina Burana contains little or no development in the classical sense, and polyphony is also conspicuously absent. It also avoids harmonic and rhythmic complexities, a fact which draws scorn on an aesthetic level from many musicians, although considering the complicated compositional techniques favored by almost all other renowned composers of the day, the work is also extremely bold in this sense.
Orff was influenced melodically by late Renaissance and early Baroque models, including William Byrd and Claudio Monteverdi. However, his shimmering orchestrations show a deference to Stravinsky. Rhythm for Orff, as for Stravinsky, is often the primary musical element. It is a common misconception that Orff based the melodies of Carmina Burana on neumatic melodies as no such assigned melodies can be found in the Burana Codex.
Although Carmina Burana was intended as a staged work involving dance, choreography, visual design and other stage action, the piece is now usually performed in concert halls as a cantata.
Carmina Burana was first staged in Frankfurt by the Frankfurt Opera on June 8, 1937. Shortly after the greatly successful premiere, Orff wrote the following letter to his publisher, Schott Music:
"Could you please get rid of everything I have written up to now and that has unfortunately been published by you? With Carmina Burana my collected works begin!"
Several performances were repeated elsewhere in Germany, and though the Nazi bureaucracy was at first nervous about the erotic tone of some of the poems and the Russian influences, its popularity quickly grew such that it became the most famous piece of music composed in Nazi Germany. Carmina Burana thus has a controversial history due to the period and location of its composition, not to mention the somewhat dubious political stance of its composer. After the war, however, the popularity of the work continued to rise, and by the 1960s Carmina Burana was well established as part of the international classical repertory.
Although 42 is an unusually mature age for the artistic renaissance that Orff saw in Carmina Burana, in retrospect the desire he expressed in the letter to his publisher has by and large been fulfilled - no other composition of his approaches its renown as evidenced in both pop culture's appropriation of O Fortuna (featured in numerous films and television advetisements) and the classical world's persistent programming and recording of the work. However, for most of the world, Orff's collected works both begin and end with Carmina Burana.
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