The former Cistercian monastery of Eberbach is the perfect location for the performance of Carl Orff’s musical firework “Carmina Burana”. It was also chosen for the film adaptation of Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” from 300 monasteries when looking for a suitable medieval venue. It is not surprising that Carmina Burana has been fully booked three times at this year’s Rheingau Music Festival. This was also emphasised by Michael Herrmann, artistic director and managing director of the festival, in his welcoming speech in the basilica. The Rheingau landscape in which the monastery is nestled and the simple, three-aisled Romanesque basilica, built between 1136 and 1186, have a magical attraction.
The concert evening opened with Aram Khachaturian’s (1895-1982) Scenes from the ballet “Spartacus”, with the Adagio from Spartacus & Phrygia from Suite No. 2 to the ballet Spartacus and with Aegina’s Variation & Baccanals from Suite No. 1. The Soviet-Armenian composer was one of the most important Soviet composers of the 1930s to 1950s. In the Soviet Union during the Stalin era, his music was considered conformist and less unwieldy than that of Prokofiev or Shostakovich.
Carmina Burana, Latin for “Beurer Lieder or songs from Benediktbeuern”, is the title of a scenic cantata by Carl Orff from 1935/1936. The texts in Middle Latin and Middle High German are taken from the Carmina Burana, a collection of song and drama texts written in the 11th and 12th centuries. They were found in the Benediktbeuern monastery library. In 1934, the almost 40-year-old Orff was looking for material that would help him make his big breakthrough. In an antiquarian bookshop catalogue in Würzburg, he discovered a title that attracted him with magical force: the collection “Carmina Burana” with song and drama texts, with drinking and love songs, moral and satirical in equal measure, a compendium from the deepest Middle Ages. The authors of the texts are mostly unknown. The only surviving manuscript dates from around 1230. This book celebrates life, love and Eros. It also contains a lament about the workings of the capricious goddess of fortune, Fortuna. Orff only uses parts and individual verses from this collection. In Carina Burana, he searches for statements that stand above the musical. He also finds texts that are at the centre of life: “Estanus interius”, for example, is an uninhibited appreciation of the here and now, an orgy of eating and drinking by monks and abbots. The selection covers a wide range of worldly themes: the vicissitudes of happiness and prosperity, the fleeting nature of life, the joy of the return of spring and the pleasures and dangers of drinking, gluttony, gambling and lust.
The setting is a completely new composition. At the time of Orff’s composition, hardly any of the original medieval melodies had been reconstructed. He therefore modelled the music on stylistic features already known from the Middle Ages.
Carmina Burana consists of 24 songs and an instrumental piece lasting around an hour. Many things are unusual, such as the scoring with two pianos and celesta as well as particularly large percussion and various choirs. The use of the individual instruments is also unusual. The strings have little or no leading role, but the wind instruments are all the more dominant. With this apparatus, Orff succeeds in illuminating the texts and releasing their poetic ideas. “The word can unfold without being jeopardised by the orchestra,” says the programme booklet.
“The important thing is the text. It became sound with the means of music and image with the means of performance. The language is spirit and the spirit behind these words came to life.” (Carl Orff on Carmina Burana)
Carl Orff (1895-1982), who never did what others thought was right, was an individualist who was not interested in symphonies, string quartets or concertos. His best-known work, the staged Carmina Burana, became one of the most popular choral works of the 20th century. The premiere took place on 8 June 1937 at the opera house in Frankfurt am Main.
With his “Carmina Burana”, Orff achieved his life’s goal: he became a composer who remains in the repertoire!
The beautiful voices of soprano Anna Nekames, a member of the Frankfurt Opera ensemble, tenor Agustin Gómez, baritone Mario Cassi, the Limburg Cathedral Boys’ Choir, the Coro Sinfonico di Milano under the direction of Massimo Fiocchi, the Orchestra Sinfonica Di Milano and the acoustics of the basilica turned Carmina Burana into a magical sound experience of a very special kind.
Many examples show just how popular Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana is.
Whether Michael Jackson, rappers or cinema history, whether as a sound backdrop for boxing matches or commercials: Orff music casts a spell over a wide audience. This is especially true of the introductory “O Fortuna”, the anthemic opening chorus with the fickle goddess of fortune enthroned in her wheel of fate. He is a musical power seller. In the film “Excalibur”, the rhythmic choral singing of the invocation to Fortuna, the goddess of fate, was used centrally. It is always about the sensory stimulation of the archaic. At the climax of the all-decisive battle, the call to Fortuna is awakened in the epic film from 1981. Orff’s Carmina Burana provides the dramatic soundtrack.
What if Carl Orff had had synthesisers at his disposal?
The legendary Doors singer Jim Morrison died in a bathtub in Paris in 1971. His grave in the Père Lachaise cemetery has become an eternal place of pilgrimage. What does this have to do with Carl Orff? Nothing at first. But in the film “The Doors” by Oliver Stone, the Carmina Burana can be heard. So far, so good. If it weren’t for the arrangement of Carmina Burana by the now deceased keyboardist Ray Manzarek. He was the musical brain of the Doors. One year after Orff’s death, in 1983, he released his Carmina Burana, a kind of recomposing in collaboration with Philip Glass, whose minimal music continued the cyclical-repetitive moment in Orff’s music. Manzarek and Glass banished the orchestra from their arrangement and placed the synthesiser at the centre. It is worth listening to The Doors just as much as Orff and analysing their history in order to discover the unity in diversity as well as the diversity in unity, which was very important for Orff. Philip Glass would have asked himself at the time “what Orff would have done if he had been there and had synthesisers at his disposal?”
Johanna Wenninger-Muhr
Sources: Rheingau Music Festival, Internet