Célassical music composer Carl Orff - Classical Music Carmina Burana

Carl Orff (July 10, 1895(1895-07-10) – March 29, 1982) was a 20th-century German composer, best known for his oratorio Carmina Burana (1937). In addition to his career as a composer, Orff developed an influential method of music education for children.

Early life and the Classical Music

Carl Orff was born in Munich on July 10, 1895. His family was Bavarian and active in the German military.

Orff started studying the piano at age five and also took organ and cello lessons. However, he was more interested in composing original music than in studying to be a performer. Orff wrote and staged puppet shows for his family, composing music for piano, violin, zither, and glockenspiel to accompany them. He had a short story published in a children's magazine in 1905 and started to write a book about nature. In his spare time he enjoyed collecting insects.

By the time he was a teenager, Orff was writing songs, although he had not studied harmony or composition; his mother helped him set down his first works in musical notation. Orff wrote his own texts and he learned the art of composing, without a teacher, by studying classical masterworks on his own.

In 1911, at age 16, some of Orff's music was published. Many of his youthful works were songs, often settings of German poetry. They fell into the style of Richard Strauss and other German composers of the day, but with hints of what would become Orff's distinctive musical language.

In 1911-1912, Orff wrote a large work for baritone voice, three choruses and orchestra, Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) op. 14, based on a passage from Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical novel of the same title. The following year, he composed an opera, Gisei, das Opfer (Gisei, the Sacrifice). Influenced by the French Impressionist composer Claude Debussy, and began to use colorful, unusual combinations of instruments in his orchestration.

Classical Music in a World War I

Moser's Musik-Lexikon states that 1895(1895-07-10) – March 29, 1982)studied at the Munich Academy of Music until 1914. He then served in the military in World War I, during which he was severely injured and nearly killed in a trench cave in. Afterwards, he held various positions at opera houses in Mannheim and Darmstadt, later returning to Munich to pursue his music studies.

The 1920s (Classical Music Composer)

In the mid-1920s Orff began to formulate a concept he called elementare Musik, or elemental music, which was based on the unity of the arts symbolized by the ancient Greek Muses (who gave music its English name) and involved tone, dance, poetry, image, design, and theatrical gesture. Like many other composers of the time he was influenced by the Russian-French émigré Igor Stravinsky. But while others followed the cool, balanced "neoclassic" works of Stravinsky, it was works like the composer's Les noces (The Wedding), a pounding, quasi-folkloric evocation of prehistoric wedding rites, that appealed to Orff. He also began adapting musical works of earlier eras for contemporary theatrical presentation, including Claudio Monteverdi's opera L'Orfeo (1607). Orff's German version, Orpheus, was staged in 1925 in Mannheim, Germany, under Orff's direction, using some of the instruments that had been used in the original 1607 performance. The passionately declaimed opera of Monteverdi's era was almost unknown in the 1920s, however, and Orff's production met with reactions ranging from incomprehension to ridicule.

From 1925 until the end of his life, Orff was the head of a department and co-founder of the Guenther School for gymnastics, music, and dance in Munich, where he worked with musical beginners. This is where he developed his theories in music education, having constant contact with children. In 1930, Orff published a manual titled Schulwerk, where he shares his method of conducting. Prior to writing Carmina Burana, Orff edited 17th century operas. He had previously founded a school for gymnastics with Dorothee Günther in 1924.

Carmina Burana, the best of classical music

Based on the Carmina Burana, an important collection of Latin and German Goliard poems discovered in 1803 in the library of the Benedictine monastery of Benediktbeuern, near Munich. Written by monks and minstrels, the collection appealed to Orff because of the variety of its humorous, sad, and suggestive verses. He selected about twenty featuring the wheel of fortune and arranged them into bawdy songs for soloists and chorus, accompanied by instruments and magic images.

This work exemplifies Orff's search for an idiom that would reveal the elemental power of music, allowing the listener to experience music as an overwhelming, primitive force. Goliard poetry, which not only celebrates love and wine, but also pokes fun at the clergy, perfectly suited Orff's desire to create a musical work appealing to a fundamental musicality that, as he believed, every human being possesses. Eschewing melodic development and harmonic complexity, and articulating his musical ideas through basic sonorities and easily discernible rhythmic patterns, Orff created an idiom which many found irresistible. The perceived "primitivism" of Carmina Burana notwithstanding, Orff believed that the profound appeal of music is not merely physical.

Carmina Burana forms the first part of a trilogy of staged cantatas called Trionfi (Triumphs), all based on Latin texts. The other two parts are Catulli Carmina and Trionfo di Afrodite. The first performance, in 1937, was a stylistic breakthrough, and brought Orff instant fame. Orff regarded Carmina Burana as the real beginning of his career, and ordered his publisher to destroy all his previous works (an instruction that fortunately was disregarded).

Carmina Burana is a scenic cantata composed by Carl Orff between 1935 and 1936. It is based on 24 of the poems found in the medieval collection Carmina Burana. Its full Latin title is Carmina Burana: Cantiones profanae cantoribus et choris cantandae comitantibus instrumentis atque imaginibus magicis ("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. The best-known movement is "Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (O Fortuna)" that opens and closes the piece.

Carmina Burana Text

Main article: Carmina Burana

Orff first encountered the text in John Addington Symonds'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, mostly in Latin verse, with a small amount of Middle High German and Old Provençal. The selection 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 and perils of drinking, gluttony, gambling and lust.

Carmina Burana Reception

Carmina Burana was first staged in Frankfurt by the Frankfurt Opera on June 8, 1937 (Conductor: Bertil Wetzelsberger, Choir Cäcilienchor, staging by Oskar Wälterlin and sets and costumes by Ludwig Sievert). Shortly after the greatly successful premiere, Orff wrote the following letter to his publisher, Schott Music:

"Everything I have written to date, and which you have, unfortunately, printed, can be destroyed. With Carmina Burana, my collected works begin."

Several performances were repeated elsewhere in Germany. The Nazi regime was at first nervous about the erotic tone of some of the poems, but eventually embraced the piece. It became the most famous piece of music composed in Germany at the time. The popularity of the work continued to rise after the war, and by the 1960s Carmina Burana was well established as part of the international classic repertory.

Alex Ross wrote that "the music itself commits no sins simply by being and remaining popular. That 'Carmina Burana' has appeared in hundreds of films and television commercials is proof that it contains no diabolical message, indeed that it contains no message whatsoever."

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 and the classical world's persistent programming and recording of the work. In the United States, Carmina Burana represents one of the few box office certainties in 20th-century music.