Carmina Burana

My choir is performing Orff’s Carmina Burana on April 21. It’s quite a romp to sing, and I’m enjoying it.

I was tasked with writing the program notes, and since I suspect that very little of my text will make it through the editorial process, I thought I’d immortalize it here (fit audience find, though few):

Let’s begin with the texts, since they’re a good deal older than the music.

They belong to a genre referred to as “Goliard” poetry (the origin of this term is unclear). This body of literature seems to have originated, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in a milieu of university students, monks, and clerics, some of whom may have been itinerant; but their social history is not well documented. Some of the writers have names (or pseudonyms) known to history, but many are anonymous.

Goliard poetry, in spite of the clerical milieu, usually isn’t very pious, and in fact it can be decidedly raunchy, celebrating the joys of drinking and gambling and the company of women, and often it’s quite disrespectful of the church hierarchy and its institutions.

Carl Orff (1895-1982) selected the lyrics he chose to set from a surprisingly sumptuous 13th-century manuscript originally found in the library of the Benedictine abbey of Benediktbeuern, in far southeastern Bavaria, near what’s now the Austrian border. (The word “Burana” Latinizes the “Beuern” part of the name.) The manuscript contains 250 or so Goliard texts, some attested in other sources and attached to a name, others not. Most are in Latin, but some are in a southern dialect of Middle High German. Orff’s selection includes some of each.

The German lyrics are fairly straightforward, at least for those who are well up on their Bavarian Middle High German, but the Latin ones often reflect a clear desire on the author’s part to show off how well-read and witty he was, and how good his Latin was. So they can be obscure, partly because we don’t get all the references, partly because the copying process is error-prone, and sometimes, perhaps, because the writer’s Latin wasn’t in fact quite as good as he thought it was. But then they didn’t have dictionaries or grammars readily available, as we have now, and they did it all from memory. Also, the writers themselves self-represent as incorrigible boozers. So allowances must be made.

Metrically, the lyrics are highly rhythmic – short lines, punchy rhymes, consistent iambic or trochaic accentual scansion. We might now call it “light verse” – think of Dorothy Parker, or of limericks. Perhaps this quality is part of what appealed to Orff, who certainly likes insistent rhythm.

Orff’s own music needs little explication; Carmina has been popular for a long time, and everybody has heard at least some of it. It’s easy to like.

To say that it’s accessible, however, is not to say that it’s trivial. The mediaeval origin of the texts clearly suggested some mediaeval compositional techniques – organum and fauxbourdon, and lots of parallel octaves and fourths and fifths. Melodic lines often recall liturgical chant. The harmonic texture can be shaggy, but it’s never arbitrary, and the voice-leading is always logical, though not always smooth. But a certain edgy angularity seems to have been what Orff was going for.

The insistent rhythm is never monotonous, and Orff makes sure to leave a few bumps in the road, just to keep us all on our toes. He has his own idiosyncratic way of notating time signatures, and he switches a good deal among measures of three beats, and four beats, and five and six beats. Somehow he stitches these together in a way that seems reasonable and discursive rather than punitive (and there are other composers who fall into the latter category). In particular, the expansion of the measure in Carmina often seems to be a way of lending emphasis to some portion of the text.

Orff has been a subject of some contention. He had the misfortune to be around during the Nazi period; and Carmina had its premiere in 1937. Like most Germans he did not cover himself with glory; he kept his head down. Go along to get along, as the saying goes. The same might be said for citizens of other countries in other times – even more recent times, and places nearer by.

But Orff himself was never a Nazi; this seems to be undisputed. And there is no evidence that he adhered to Nazi ideology. Indeed, he was close friends with some distinguished resisters, though never, it seems, a resister himself.

But is his music Nazi? Well, what makes music Nazi? The lyrics are often a pretty good indicator. The Horst Wessel Song is clearly a Nazi song. The lyrics of Carmina, however, were written seven or eight hundred years before there were any Nazis, and written, moreover, by a disreputable lot of anti-authoritarian barflies and wenchers and vagabonds. Not exactly the Hitler Youth.

The usually great Richard Taruskin, some years ago, wrote an essay in which he suggested that Carmina is Nazi music because some Nazis enjoyed it, presumably for Nazi reasons, and we should avoid things that Nazis enjoy. But since Nazis sometimes also enjoy bacon and eggs, not to mention Beethoven, this seems a bit stringent.

Some other Nazis did not approve of Orff’s music; they thought it was modern and hence degenerate (“entartet”). Those who did approve argued that it was vigorously folkish and robust and all that good German stuff – those being the poles of aesthetic debate in the time and place.

Now, almost ninety years later, in a very different cultural and political setting, we have, fortunately, a different frame of reference. Carmina is certainly “modern”, whatever that loose term means. Would anyone now call it degenerate? Or folkish? And it seems questionable whether many of us will find it bringing out our lurking inner Nazi.