four-thirty-three

I.
One for the “Great Artist, Horrible Human Being” file: Carl Orff, the composer who lived a monstrous lie

Orff is best known for the cantata Carmina Burana, a powerful choral/orchestral work noted for its bold primitivism. (Most people have at least heard the opening movement “O Fortuna,” the soundtrack to a thousand movie trailers.)  It was first staged in 1937, and would become the most famous piece of music composed in Nazi Germany.  Which raises anew the age-old question: to what extent do we embrace or reject Great Art created by totally repugnant people?  Bonus question: Does the fact that the Nazis were particularly embracing of Orff’s rough and almost barbaric aesthetic change your opinion?

(Feel free to leave your opinion in the comments, or tell us about your favorite Great Dickhead Artist)

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II.

 

In 1803, a manuscript which would come to be known as the Codex Buranus was discovered at the Benediktbeuern Abbey in Bavaria.  The manuscript contains over 300 poems written by Goliards, priests/scholars/satirists who flourished in the 12th and 13th centuries, and verses from the Codex would become famous through Orff’s Carmina Burana.  Note the marks above the text in the image: the Latin text was intended to be sung, and those markings are neumes which are intended to show (very, very roughly) the contour of the melodic line.  More about the Codex Buranus can be found here.

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III.

One of my all time favorite recordings is Carmina Burana: Medieval songs from the Benediktbeuern manuscript by Joel Cohen and the Boston Camerata.  It’s sadly out of print, but you can find used copies on Amazon for fairly cheap.  The album represents Cohen’s attempt to reconstruct musical settings of poems from the Codex Buranus.

Below the cut:  Recordings of Orff’s and Cohen’s settings of these wonderful and bizarre poems, juxtaposed to contrast Orff’s primitivism with the medieval performance practices of the Boston Camerata.  Links to mp3s will be live for about a week.

(After one week, visit here and/or here to purchase these recordings, or email me)

[all links to files now disabled]

A good place to start would be the different versions of “O Fortuna, velut luna.”  We all know Orff’s setting: blunt, forceful, almost violent, concluding with a dramatic fanfare in the parallel major key.  Cohen’s reconstruction is austere and chantlike, as well as monophonic; as far as we know, vocal harmony was not a feature of this music.

Carl Off, “O Fortuna” [mp3]

Boston Camerata, “O fortuna, velut luna” [mp3]

The text of “Olim lacus colueram” is decidedly odd; a swan, roasting on a spit, sings about his plight in the first person.  Orff’s setting is appropriately weird: a tenor takes the role of the swan (with a men’s chorus singing the “miser, modo niger” refrain), and the tessitura is unforgiving; the aria is often sung largely in falsetto.

Orff, “Olim lacus colueram” [mp3]

Joel Cohen noticed that the text of “Olim lacus” is metrically identical to the “Dies Irae” sequence from the Requiem Mass, and uses the “Dies Irae” chant as the source for this recording’s music.  The chorus adopts a sardonic tone, which is appropriate as the anonymous poet is almost certainly parodying the liturgical use (a practice for which the Goliards are well-known).

Boston Camerata, “Olim lacus colueram” [mp3]

“Tempus est jocundum” is an erotic poem; a musicologist did a rough reconstruction in the 1960s based on the neumes in the Codex Buranus, and Cohen uses that melody in his recording.

Boston Camerata, “Tempus est jocundum” [mp3]

Orff’s setting of “Tempus est iocundum” is one of my favorite parts of his oratorio; the repeated “O”s, the back-and-forth between the Mannerchor” and “Frauenchor,” the barely-held-back accelerandi, the chorus’s declamation of “pereo” (referring to death as an orgasmic metaphor) at the end of each of the solos… all of these are choices that, given the text, I find very effective.

Carl Orff, “Tempus est iocundum” [mp3]

This entry was posted Thursday, February 26th, 2009 at 4:09 pm and is filed under music. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.