Carmina Burana

Exuberance runs in torrents through Carmina Burana. Carl Orff’s perennially popular choral cantata, classical music’s equivalent of a Hollywood Technicolor blockbuster, seizes the listener’s attention with its first timpani stroke and grips it with a sequence of 25 richly scored, emotionally direct, musically simple movements, the last of which echoes the first. Although usually presented as a concert piece, Carmina Burana was originally conceived as part of a trilogy of stage works and was first performed in 1937 at the Frankfurt Opera complete with costumes and scenery. The work owes its genesis to Orff’s discovery of a copy of Johann Andreas Schmeller’s scholarly edition from the 1840s of sentimental and bawdy lyrics supposedly penned between the late 11th and early 13th centuries by the monks of Benediktbeuern Abbey in southern Bavaria. While it is likely that the “Songs from Benediktbeuern” originated elsewhere, there’s no doubt about the irreverence of their take on life and love. Orff’s choice of verse includes texts in medieval Latin, Middle High German and, in the case of the seductive baritone solo “Dies, nox et omnia”, Latin and Old French. He grouped them under three headings: “Fortune, Empress of the World”, “In the Tavern” and “The Court of Love”. Together they warn of fickle Fortune, the sensual pleasures of spring, the joys of drink and the perils of temptation, and the ecstasy of “lascivious love”, spurred along by the composer’s metronomic rhythms, battalions of percussion instruments, the arrival of a full-throated boys’ choir at the Court of Love and a heady mix of contrasting solo and choral numbers.