By Juan Arturo Brennan
It is unquestionable that Carmina Burana (1937) is one of the most popular works in the musical repertoire of the twentieth century, as evidenced by its frequent appearances in symphonic programs and the more than thirty recordings of the work that exist.
“Carmina Burana is, neither more nor less, secular songs to be sung by singers and choirs, accompanied by instruments and magical images.”
- Carl Orff
Its popularity, however, does not detract from the contradictory and somewhat mysterious nature of Carmina Burana. For example, few music lovers would know in which genre to classify this work by Orff. Some texts define it as a dramatic cantata, others as a scenic cantata, still others as a scenic oratorio.
Orff himself, faithful to the Latin inspiration of the work, offers a clear clue in this regard. Carmina Burana is, no more and no less, cantiones profanae cantoribus et choribus cantandae comitantibus instrumentis atque imaginibus magicis. In other words, profane songs to be sung by singers and choir accompanied by instruments and images. Those who are accustomed to the concert version of Carmina Burana wonder what are the scenic possibilities of these texts; one of the many alternatives that can be cited as a reference is the wonderful theatrical and film version by Jean-Pierre Ponelle.
For first-time listeners to Carmina Burana, or for those seeking more information about a favorite work, a quick exploration of the work can be done in four brief sections
1.- The history. Towards the XII century a very particular kind of cleric had been defined in Europe: the so-called itinerant monk, wandering scholar, or goliath. This last name has two possible origins: one, probably apocryphal, refers to the followers of a certain Golias, a very learned man, but given to gluttony and caprice; the other, more plausible, refers to a derivation of the word gluttony in old French. Whatever the etymological origin of the term, the fact is that these goliard monks of the Middle Ages were quite amusing characters and very given to the pleasures of the flesh: they slept in ovens, exhibited themselves naked in public, frequented taverns, gambling dens and brothels and obtained their food almost always illegally or, at least, cheated. They were chocarreros, maledicators, blasphemers, sycophants who professed themselves clerics to the scorn of the clergy. As was to be expected, the church denounced and anathematized them by means of rigorous texts born in various councils: Rouen 1231, Salzburg 1291, etc. The Goliards, after all cultivated and studious men, left to posterity a fascinating collection of their writings, which in their own time were known as injurious songs.
2.- The texts. Carl Orff used as a textual source for this work some of the ancient manuscripts found in the Benedictine monastery of Beuren in Bavaria. The texts themselves, written basically in Latin and seasoned here and there with fragments of old French and German, mainly celebrate nature, music, wine, food and carnal love. The songs selected by Orff show remarkable attention to metrical patterns, and the texts are full of irony, sensuality and fatalism.
Orff himself stated the following:
"I began a process of searching and selecting, of discovery and rejection, until particular pieces emerged from the mass. After repeated readings, certain verses within the multi-stanza poems stood out, leading to new implications. In this way, the textual composition of the scenic cantata was soon defined. What impressed me most were the powerful rhythms, as well as the expressiveness of this creation and, importantly, the vowel-filled musicality and that compact, unique quality of the Latin language."
3.- The music. It is said that Carl Orff was a pioneer of minimalist music many years before such term was coined. The main characteristics of his style are particularly evident in Carmina Burana and in the other two works that complete the trilogy called Triumphs, which are Catulli Carmina (1943) and The Triumph of Aphrodite (1953): primitive musical declamation, a particularly marked percussive weave, a minimum of harmony and the almost total absence of counterpoint. This musical primitivism (which has been considered as an anti-intellectual reaction of Orff) has in Carmina Burana one of its most interesting aspects: the rhythmic irregularities that the composer has built from the expansion and contraction of the original metrical patterns give this work a very attractive driving force. And those who have read Carl Orff's biography will find in Carmina Burana certain melodic and orchestration elements that may come to justify a paragraph stating that "Carl Orff and Werner Egk inherited the romantic ideals of Richard Strauss and at the same time initiated a radical reaction against those same ideals."
4.- Politics. In a more or less recent text of art criticism an essayist affirmed that "Carmina Burana is, obviously, fascist music", in the context of its use in the soundtrack of Pier Paolo Pasolini's film Saló or the one hundred and twenty days of Sodom (1975). With such an aggressive adjective as this, perhaps it would be more prudent to affirm, in any case, that Carl Orff was a fascist. Even today, Orff's ideological stance towards Nazism continues to be debated, and in this discussion he has been assigned different positions, from complicit tolerance to active participation, including what some call disguised opposition, citing as proof his stage work Die Kluge, in which Orff seems to denounce with a certain subtlety the traps of totalitarianism. Be that as it may, in the long run Orff himself was tangentially touched by traces of fascist behavior against him: there are some recordings of his Catulli Carmina in which the Latin translation of the erotic verses of Catullus and Lesbia has been censored.
Epilogue: Much of the information contained in this note concerning the texts of the Goliard monks is due to the magnificent prologue by Carlos Yarza to the 1978 Seix Barral edition of the Carmina Burana, a text that is highly recommended to all those interested in approaching Orff's music and the origin of his texts by an alternative route.
Postlude: One of the many signs of the fascination that Carmina Burana continues to cause even in the least expected areas, is the existence of a CD containing a rock version of the work, originally made in 1983 by Ray Manzarek, former keyboardist of the formidable group The Doors, in which some members of the Philip Glass Ensemble participate. On the other hand, it is also interesting that in recent years there has been a proliferation of recordings of the "original" versions (i.e. with medieval style and instrumentation) of the songs of the Benedictine monastery of Beuren. These are well worth listening to, especially to get a rough idea of what these amusingly injurious songs might have sounded like at the time they were created by the Goliards.
