Yet I do think it is possible to explore such a possibility - albeit with due caution. How the Nazis used music to celebrate and facilitate murder And, in any case, it is notoriously difficult to try and define what a fascist music might be as we are more wont to do in the case of, say, architecture.Īs I have suggested elsewhere, we could be forgiven in fact for concluding that Nazism (and fascism more generally) is something which happens to music and musicians, and not something with which a musical work can be complicit in a uniquely musical way. The subject matter certainly appealed to Nazi sensibilities that sought to legitimise the Third Reich through association with past empires, particularly the Germany of the medieval era.īeing approved by a fascist regime does not in and of itself make something fascist. In his book The Twisted Muse (1997), musicologist Michael Kater asserts that Orff was a central figure in what he describes as a “School of Nazi modernism” which also included composers Werner Egk, Boris Blacher, Gottfried von Einem and Rudolf Wagner-Régeny.Ī popular and critical success from its first performance, Carmina Burana was performed regularly in Germany throughout the second world war. I would challenge any carnivore to hear the extraordinary twelfth movement Olim Lacus Colueram (“Once I lived on lakes”) which gives voice to a roasting swan, and not be drawn to contemplate - if only for a moment - vegetarianism. They were envisioned as theatrical events.Ī Roasting Swan laments its fate to those who are about to consume it.
#Carl orff carmina burana lyrics full
The full title - Songs of Beuern: Secular songs for singers and choruses to be sung together with instruments and magical images - reminds us the original performances were more than concerts. The original poems had been preserved with their own melodies, but Orff was not aware of their existence when composing his own settings. In the mid 1930s Orff asked the German poet and jurist Michel Hofmann to organise 24 of those poems into a libretto for what he envisioned as a kind of secular oratorio with staging elements.
These “Carmina Burana” soon became well-known across Europe. There, in 1847, a modern edition was made of perhaps the most remarkable work in the collection: a beautifully illuminated manuscript of secular poems in both Latin and Middle High German. When it was dissolved in 1803, its library was transferred to the Court Library at Munich. The village was home to a Benedictine monastery founded in 733. Beuern is a variant of the German word for Bavaria, Bayern, but here it specifically refers to a village south of Munich at the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. The title simply means “Songs from Beuern” in Latin. Premiering in June 1937 at the Frankfurt Opera, its compositional history therefore also intersects with aspects of the racial, cultural and aesthetic cultural policies the Nazi Party introduced across Germany after its rise to power in 1933. Orff Schulwerk became influential across the West in the years after the second world war (and helped make percussion instruments in particular part of the standard kit of the school music room) but Carmina Burana - the sound of which reflects some of the vocal and percussive interests of the Schulwerk approach - dates from just before the onset of that war.
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