Carl Orff‘s Carmina Burana — particularly the O Fortuna movement — holds quite a place in popular culture.
It’s often tempting to see Classical Music as sepia-hued etchings from the past, Borepatch says, but this misses the fact that the people involved were human — quite human:
And so with Carl Orff.
He was a very modern classical composer, who wrote what we would describe as classically classical music. Music that was praised by the Nazis in his native Germany. The music is great — you’ve heard it. His weakness was common — you’ve seen this sort of thing yourself, although almost certainly on a lesser scale.
You see, Orff had a life long friend, who got involved with an anti-Nazi resistance movement. When his friend was arrested, his friend’s wife begged Orff to use his influence to save him. Orff refused, fearing arrest himself. That all too common weakness haunted him for the rest of his life.
Orff’s fame came from his 1937 composition, Carmina Burana, which he based on a medieval manuscript of the same name. Lost in the Monastery library, the manuscript was found in the early nineteenth century. The fame is justified, and survives to this day. As I said earlier, you’ve heard this before.
This piece describes the goddess Fortuna, and her wheel. Some people are rising in stature and fortune, some are falling. I wonder if Orff thought of his friend in these terms, with his star rising, and his friend’s falling, ultimately towards the firing squad.
Bruce Charlton brings up Carmina Burana, his favorite piece of 20th-century music, while addressing the question of whether the Middle Ages were merry or miserable:
Any past era was “miserable” for most people in the sense that (compared with the past several decades) there was a lot of starvation, disease, warfare, torture, discomfort and dirt.
But in eras of great Christian devoutness — other-worldly eras — these factors carried much, much less weight than they do or would for us.
An interesting test case is Carmina Burana (songs from the Beuern, a monastery), which is a collection of essentially secular lyrics, a selection from which was set to music in a dramatized cantata by Carl Orff during the paganistic era of National Socialism — in other words a modern and non-Christian angle on medievalism.
Orff’s Carmina Burana represents just about the “merriest” version of the medieval era that is possible minus Christianity — and (yet) it is (taken in total) a terrifying vision of life.