Music |
Carl Orff: “Carmina Burana”
By
Published: Mar 05, 2018
Category:
Classical
It’s the most popular piece of classical music written in the 20th century.
How popular? This popular:
This popular:
This popular:
Here’s “O Fortuna,” the part of “Carmina Burana” that you have almost surely heard, even if you don’t know its origin.
What is “Carmina Burana?”
BIG! At its largest, there are 200 or more voices, an orchestra of 100 players, a children’s choir, and 3 soloists. [To buy the CD recorded by James Levine and the Chicago Symphony, and get a free MP3 download, click here. To buy a less expensive but equally powerful recording by Michael Tilson Thomas and the Cleveland Symphony, click here.]
EXUBERANT! The subtitle of the oratorio is “Cantiones profanae, cantoribus et choris cantandae, comitantibus instrumentis atque imaginibus magicis” — or “secular songs for singers and choruses accompanied by instruments and magical images.” Note: secular. Which leads to….
SEXY! Think “love, lust, the pleasures of drinking.” But you don’t grasp that, because the language is… Latin. Translation: “Come, come, come now!”
But…. all that is in the service of some serious ideas: how time is a thief, how success is followed by failure, how lust and drinking and excess lead to bitterness and grief — in short, how the wheel of fortune is endlessly turning.
In terms of the music, Orff’s goal was a spectacle, a piece that fully engaged the listener. In an ideal performance, there would be dance, there would be theater. This outsized ambition and the grandiosity of the piece naturally came to the attention of Hitler’s colleagues when “Carmina Burana” was first performed in 1937. The erotic content of the words didn’t thrill the Nazis, but they thought they heard a rousing patriotism in the music, and they embraced the piece. So did the Italians. Performed at La Scala in 1942, it was positioned as a showcase for Fascism.
Orff had no real politics. He escaped post-war accusations and judgment. And by 1960, “Carmina Burana” was an international classic — a hot-blooded bookend to Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.”
BONUS VIDEO
The entire work. 1 hour, 11 minutes.
