"Fortune smiled on me when she put into my hands a Würzburg second-hand bookshop's catalogue, in which I found a title that drew me in with magical force: Carmina Burana: Latin and German Poems of a 13th-Century Manuscript from Benediktbeuern." (Benediktbeuern is a monastery in Bavaria, and the title Carmina Burana is simply a Latin rendition of "Songs of Beuern.")
Carmina burana composer series#
The composer recalled his discovery in a series of autobiographical documentations published in the late 1970s. It was in this context that Orff stumbled on the inspiration for his Carmina Burana. (Nazi propaganda took this to new extremes - a well-known example is Leni Riefenstahl's film of the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics, Olympiad.) Germans made pilgrimages to sites of past cultural and political greatness like Wartburg Castle and Goslar's Kaiserpfalz, and conservative intellectuals longed for their nation's imperial past. Groups like the Wander-vogel (a German youth movement) sang the praises of clean living. Movements celebrating the body and nature - two subjects in the poem set by Orff - surged in popularity during the first decades of the 20th century, with exercise and the outdoors offered as alternatives to cultural decadence and urban squalor. This return to the past was common in conservative thought at the time in Germany. Luke Passion (a work now known to be spurious, but thought at the time to be by Bach), the latter accompanied by slide projections of 15th-century Tyrolean woodcuts, were recognized as pioneering by contemporaries. His staged realizations of German baroque composer Heinrich Schütz' Auferstehungshistoria (Resurrection Story) and J.S. Orff also served as director of the Munich Bach Society for the 1932/33 season.
While Bartók was orchestrating The Miraculous Mandarin, Orff was arranging scores by the 17th-century Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi - the opera Orfeo, the Lamento d'Ariana, and the Ballo dell'ingrate. From early on, the composer was interested in the musical past.
Instead of going for all-out musical revolution, Orff studied earlier musical forms and styles and used them to create his own compositional language. Carl Orff had more in common with conservative trends in German culture than he did with the iconoclasm of the Weimar years.
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