So I’m sitting here listening to a random selection from my list of “happy little ditties to slaughter mice to”, and O Fortuna from Orff’s Carmina Burana comes up.
Even if you don’t listen to classical music ever, you’ve probably heard O Fortuna; any movie with a Cosmic Horror, Artifact Of Doom or Omnicidal Maniac cues it up to go with the insane laughter and the Earth-Shattering Kaboom *. This makes perfect sense, what with the booming tympani and the cymbals and the semi-hysterical choir.
But the Carmina Burana is supposed to be a tone poem ** based on some 13th-century Latin poetry, and if you look at the actual lyrics the sentiment being expressed is “life’s a crapshoot, and you always get the short end of the stick, so let’s sit around and mope”. How did Orff get from this to Music to Level Tokyo By?
The rest of the Carmina Burana is comparatively low-key; Orff being kind of a one-hit wonder, I’m not familiar with any of his other stuff. Does he always throw in an End of the World As We Know It section or is this an aberration? And if the latter, anyone have a clue why?
JRB
Unless they use Mozart’s Dies Irae, which I so totally don’t get; dramatic, sure, but about as evil as licorice.
Fortuna has made at least one other explicit appearance in western music in text of this kind, as an all-powerful, unpredictable and sometimes malevolent power - the Italian song Fortuna Desperata, heavily borrowed in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, including as a basis for much church music:
Orff was just picking up the threads of a conveniently dramatic tradition. And having a bit of fun. Don’t take the piece too seriously!
Sheesh! Don’t judge the entirety of *Carmina Burana *by “O, Fortuna”!
It has some naughty bits! (Well, “naughty” may be a bit of a stretch.)
Here’s a translation of part of “Chramer, gip die varwe mir.” Yeah, I know. 13th-Century German does not roll so trippingly off the tongue as the Latin.
Good men, love
women worthy of love!
Love ennobles your spirit
and gives you honour.
Look at me,
young men!
Let me please you!
Or how about this, from “Amor volet undique”?
Cupid flies everywhere
seized by desire.
Young men and women
are rightly coupled.
And then there are the other two pieces that, with the Carmina Burana, make up Orff’s Trionfi: Catulli Carmina and Trionfo di Afrodite.
As with others, my question to the OP would be: Why shouldn’t it be bombastic?
Actually Carmina Burana has a few wonderfully loud, brash, no-holds-barred, balls-to-the-wall movements, though none as popular as “O Fortuna,” of course. My favorites are:
“Fortunae plango vulnera (I Bewail the Wounds of Fate)”
“Ecce gratum (Behold The Good and Long-awaited Spring)”
“Were diu werlt alle min (If The Whole World Were Mine)”
“In taberna quando sumus (When We Are in the Tavern)”
“Circa Mea Pectora (Your Beauty Draws My Sighs)”
“Ceni, veni, venias (Come, Come)”
Even some solos are definitely not for the weak-willed singer, including
“Estuans interius (In Great Anger and Turmoil)” and 13. “Ego Sum Abbas (I Am the Abbot)”
Of course, it also has sublimely lovely segments too, mostly in the section devoted to love (not surprisingly). The whole piece ranges from odes to natural beauty, lust, pure adoration, bawdy humor, drunken revelry, warlike ferocity, tenderness … it’s an altogether rollicking good time. Get a recording of the whole thing and let it blast!
Singing CB was one of the most exhilerating experiences I had as a chorus member. Pure awesome.
We just sang the whole thing a couple months ago. Lots of fun! I love the In Taberna part myself.
Not to be a ‘me too!’, but yeah… Why shouldn’t it be bombastic? It’s a fantastic celebration of wine, song, fortune, and romance / sex. A fantastic piece, all around.
Apparently, the music and singing are only part of the bombast, as originally conceived. It was intended as a staged work involving choreography and visual design elements.
Carmina Burana was intended as a staged work involving dance, choreography, visual design and other stage action. The subtitle (translated from Latin) is “Secular songs for singers and choruses to be sung together with instruments and magic images.”
I sang it a few years back. All was good except for that damned “wafna” part where you seem to have to pick a pitch out of nowhere. Oh sure on the second go around most of the choir was quite solid, but that first “wafna” was a complete crapshoot. Of course it was short enough that no one in the audience realized how bad it was.
My dad and sister have sung it with a major Pittsburgh chorus. They say it’s a lot of fun.
I think its recent popularity owes a lot to it being so prominently featured in John Boorman’s 1981 Arthurian movie Excalibur. It got a lot of exposure from that movie, and seems to have been used a lot more since then.
Every chorister, out there, who has ever sung the Carmina Burana should sit down with their score and sing with me:
Oh, four tuna
Bring more tuna
Statuary on his knees!
Some men like cheese!
Hot, temperate cheese!
Vimto can taste of kidneys…
Lukewarm two rat
Bet too cool, rat.
You don’t get cheese or chicken!
Bend Chips all day
Hot and salty
Dip sore feet
Good, hot chili
Saucy codpiece
Ate spleen of niece!
Brought up too full food in me
Suck juice from moose
Fun with some goose
Second these so rude big knees
Open bra top!
Get them loved up
Leaking foot when near cherries
Look, they look good
Dogs sure are cute
Farewell to knees and berries
Salsa cookies
Windmill cookies
They’ll give you gonorrhea…
This octopus –
Let’s give him boots
Hand him her carburetor
Lovely Torah
Send me more of Potato soup and chicken
What mess again
Sing it, Ugly!
Be good for peace monkey’s sake!
::: takes a bow :::
(Yes, this is an old parody, and no, it never “gets old”. My choirmaster passed it around to us when we were hired out to sing the CB.)
Do you want a technicl explanation of the reason for the bombast?
Well, let’s see…
There’s a full orchestra with lots of instruments playing at their maximum volume.
There more than one choir absolutely screaming their heads right off their necks.
The music’s form is built in a manner that starts off with a bang, then jumps right in with a rhythmic section that naturally leads one to become more excited.
The music’s harmony is built with an open fifth in the bass (tuba, piano, harp, contra-bassoon, bass - lots of doubling there). The open fifth to modern listeners is a very powerful sound leading to levels of ecstasy not found in Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, or Brahms.
No. I want an ontological explanation for the bombast; why is that particular bit of poetry given such apocalyptic treatment? In terms of the piece itself, the corresponding lyrics seems to me much more melancholy and defeatist than the music, and in terms of the Carmina Buranain toto, a) although the whole thing is a bit on the larger-than-life side, the other parts seem to have a better fit between the tone of the music and the content of the lyrics (raucous drinking songs get raucous music, etc), and b) there doesn’t seem to be anything that would justify the fire-and-brimstone approach taken in O Fortuna (it’s mostly about good-timing, after all).
Like I said, I’m not familiar with Orff’s other works (hell, I had to check Wikipedia to make sure he wrote other works), so I don’t know if he just has to wrap everything up with a massive thumping bang irregardless, and my Latin and Medieval German aren’t good enough to read the original codex to see if there is anything more suitably rabid he could have used. I was hoping someone out there could shed some more light on Orff’s choice than “hey, it sounds really cool” (I figured that out already ).
It’s interesting that in Germany he is more famous for his influence on music teaching. When I hear “Orff” the first thing that comes to mind is a first-grader with a xylophone.
Is it? To me it is an emotional rollercoaster embracing the full range of the human soul in all its most basic and primal states, wild, untamed and uncivilised like no other piece I know. Low-key is among the last adjectives I’d choose.
I blame Hitler. It’s not necessarily fair to Orff, who might’ve made it bombastic regardless, but he released it at a time when the guy in charge was somebody who ate bombastic three meals a day.
).