Carmina Burana: Sacred and Profane Richard Wagner 1813-1883 Richard Wagner Overture to Tannhäuser In the history of musical style, instrumental music changes, opera is reformed. No musical genre has elicited such passion, polemics and partisanship as opera. In eighteenth-century Paris, the adherents of French opera fought duels with the devotees of the Italian style. The birth of opera itself was midwifed by a storm of polemical treatises. The reason behind such intensity goes back to the first operas at the dawn of the seventeenth century. The "inventors" of the genre believed that sung drama, the perfect combination of music and poetry - in imitation of the presumed style of ancient Greek tragedy - would transport the listener to the highest level of aesthetic transcendence. And for this reason, the earliest opera composers chose the myth of Orpheus, whose singing was able to move the gods of the underworld to return to him his dead wife Eurydice. Richard Wagner bought into operatic ideology with a vengeance. He conceived of his music drama as a Gesamtkunstwerk (all-inclusive artwork) that would combine all the arts, in effect rendering him a new Orpheus. Wagner shattered all the rules and conventions of opera, virtually abandoning formal recitatives and arias and replacing them with through-composed vocal lines over sumptuous orchestration containing thematic "commentary" on the action. His revolutionary musical style Balkanized critics and public into pro- and anti-Wagner camps, with the music of Brahms and Verdi as the principal foils. By the early 1840s, with the success of the early and more conventional Rienzi and The Flying Dutchman, Wagner had become a force in German music. His next – and more doctrinaire – opera, Tannhäuser, based on medieval legends about an actual Minnesinger, or poet-musician – an Aryan Orpheus who died c. 1265. The opera premiered in Dresden in 1845 and quickly became enormously popular throughout Germany. Its protagonist, who has been living it up for a year with Venus and is, incidentally, also a singer-composer, wins a contest with a song extolling profane love. Condemned to clean up his act before he can claim the hand of his pure betrothed, Elisabeth, he makes a pilgrimage to Rome where the pope refuses to grant him absolution. Tannhäuser returns to Germany carrying his withered staff, symbol of his continued state of sin, in time to witness Elisabeth's funeral. He collapses and dies in remorse as his staff blooms, symbolizing his redemption through love. In 1861 Wagner had planned a production for the Opera in Paris but refused to add the "obligatory" ballet in the second act. The production was a failure, disrupted by catcalls from the Jockey Club, never to return to the Paris stage for another 34 years. Nevertheless, he retained the revisions for Paris into what is now the standard version. In 1859 it became the first Wagner opera to be performed in America. The Overture adheres to a formula, adopted particularly in Germany, of "previewing" the story through principal themes of the upcoming drama. It begins with the famous Pilgrim's chorus, passing to the swirling music of the hedonistic pleasures of Venusberg, Tannhäuser's prize-winning song to Venus, his expulsion from Wartburg Castle and his return, once again to the music of the Pilgrim's chorus. Wagner himself viewed his opera as representing the battle between profane and sacred love and the Overture emphasizes this dichotomy rather than introducing themes associated with the characters. There's nothing, for example of poor Elisabeth – although Wagner includes a sensuous clarinet riff for Venus herself. The composer's complex system of Leitmotifs, utilized to its limits in The Ring of the Nibelungen, was several years in the future. Carl Orff 1895-1982 Carl Orff Carmina Burana, Scenic Cantata “My collected works begin with the Carmina Burana,” declared Carl Orff after the successful premiere in 1937 in Frankfurt, where it was staged with elaborate costumes and scenery. A late bloomer, Orff dismissed most his earlier compositions, including three adaptations of stage works by one of the “inventors” of opera, Claudio Monteverdi, as derivative and withdrew many of them. Carmina Burana also turned out to be his most well received by far. While he subsequently composed over a dozen other stage works in a similar musical style, none achieved the popularity of his “Opus One.” Nineteen thirty-seven? In Frankfurt? Yes, this most popular work, a performance of which occurs once a day somewhere in the world, was not labeled “degenerate,” like so much contemporary music in Nazi Germany. Rather, Goebbels himself lauded Carmina Burana – in spite of its racy text – as a model for the music of the Reich. The composer not only positioned himself during the Nazi regime for the role of Reichsminister für Musik, but also abandoned and refused to help and bail out his friends and protectors when they ran afoul of the Nazis. In an article in BBC Music, Tony Palmer relates a conversation with Orff’s only daughter, in which she stated: “He did not really love people; if anything, he despised people unless they could be useful to him.” If there were a contest for the composer with the most despicable character Carl Orff would definitely make the finals. Orff is also known for his educational program of music and dance for schoolchildren, called ,i>Orff-Schulwerk. Beginning with the 1920s, he and his associate, Gunild Keetman, developed the program whose goal was to teach children the fundamentals of melody, rhythm and movement, using the simplest of means found in any kindergarten or elementary school: the human voice, toy drums – some specially designed by Orff – xylophones, recorders and bongo drums. Later in works for older children, he added string instruments. The program faltered during the war years – it didn’t compare favorably with the militaristic music favored by the leaders of the Hitler Youth-, but in 1948 it became for five years an immensely successful educational radio show. So-called “Orff instruments” and his pedagogy are still used in many elementary schools in the United States, Europe and Asia. Orff’s fascination with and sensitivity to instrumental sonority also found its way into his brilliant orchestral writing. Perhaps it is the physical exuberance and freshness, coupled with a passionate and sometimes racy text – a full translation in programs and record liner notes used to be expurgated – and an easily accessible musical language that made Carmina Burana one of the most popular twentieth-century stage productions. Like Richard Strauss, Orff aimed in this and in his later stage works at a Gesamtkunstwerk (a concept originally used by Richard Wagner as the foundation of his operas), an artistic synthesis in which text, music, scenery and movement are unified and completely coordinated. The question is seldom raised with enthusiastic Carmina mavens but here it is: Does the unsavory character of an artist affect the inherent quality of his or her work or our attitude to it? Carmina Burana is the title given in 1847 to an edited collection of mostly secular songs (“carmina”) from an early thirteenth-century manuscript discovered in 1803 in a Benedictine abbey in Benediktbeuern, a village in Bavaria (hence the Latinized form of the name, “burana”). The manuscript contains about 250 medieval poems and songs, including works in Latin, Middle High German and French, the bulk of which do not appear in any other manuscript. They were assigned to categories: clerical poems, love songs, drinking and gaming songs, and two religious dramas. The collection is clearly a songbook, since many of the pieces included musical notation, but in a style of over a century earlier that did not indicate either exact pitches or rhythms. The actual melodies had to be reconstructed from other later manuscripts. The poets are mostly anonymous but are believed to have been “goliards,” once thought to be defrocked priests and monks; the term is now considered to be an ironic designation of poets who wrote satires and parodies for carnivals and festivals. The best known of these was the “feast of fools,” during which mock popes and cardinals satirized the religious life and parodied church services. Although the Benediktbeuern Manuscript contains no exact notation, Orff was certainly acquainted with the theories of reconstructing medieval secular song, which he often incorporated into his own settings. Since early medieval musical manuscripts contain no specific instrumental accompaniment or harmony, Orff's settings have little or no harmonic development, relying instead on terse melodic motives and rhythms derived from the meter of the poems themselves. All of the poetry is strophic, and Orff creates stunning instrumental interludes and accompaniments whose variety and vivid tone color break the monotony of the simple melodies. Orff employs a large orchestra to give him a wide palette of timbre and tone color, but he only occasionally uses the entire orchestra at one time, and then for dramatic effect. Although Carmina Burana is often performed in concert, numerous choreographers have tried their hand at staging it for chorus and dancers as the composer had intended. The focus on rhythm makes all of the choral numbers quite danceable, and even the solo arias are easily adaptable to dance. The selection of poems serves as a symbolic statement on man’s subjugation to Fortune. Contrary to popular belief, the symbol of wheel of fortune did not begin as a TV game show but can be traced to ancient Roman civilization and adorns the original thirteenth-century manuscript. Carmina Burana opens and closes with a choral ode “O, Fortuna,” a paean to Fortune, Empress of the World, “changeable as the moon.” Within this frame are three large sections, taken from various parts of the original manuscript: Part 1 "In Springtime," includes a sub-section "In the Meadow;" Part 2 "In the Tavern," features baritone and tenor soloists; and Part 3 "The Court of Love," might just as well be called “The Court of Seduction.” Each part explores the fundamental human needs: nature, wine and sex, which, with Fortune on their side, men and women can enjoy to the fullest. Part 1, "In Springtime" begins with an a cappella chorus intoning a welcome to spring. "Veris leta facies," (Spring’s bright face) with oriental-sounding interludes, the modern instruments imitating gongs and bells. The baritone solo maintains the atmosphere. In the poem welcoming spring, "Ecce gratum" (Behold spring), two spring dances frame two poems, "Floret silva nobilis" (The noble forest blooms), first in Latin, then translated into German, accompanied by drums and tambourines. Orff includes an effective bit of tone painting on the words "meus amicus hinc equitavit" (my lover has ridden away). In "Chramer gip die warve mir" (Hawker, give me some rouge) the women sing the verses, accompanied by a humming refrain for the men and women. Part 2, "In the Tavern," conjures the masculine world of the medieval tavern, containing perhaps the most distinctive songs in the collection, notably the lament of the roasting swan, "Olim latus colueram" (Once I lived in the lakes) – the only song in the piece that departs from the diatonic intervals of medieval music; and the song of the drunken abbot of Cockaigne (a medieval utopia), whose satirical rant parodies monastic chant. The section ends with a rousing ode to dissipation and debauchery. In Part 3, the raucous bar-room ambience shifts to the delicately refined – but not too refined – world of courtly love, as the women and soprano soloist admit that a girl without a man lacks all delight. The baritone returns, now in the guise of a troubadour, the verses of his song, "Dies, nox et omnia"  (Day, night and ever) yearning for his absent lover.   Part 3 concludes with a choral dance, "Tempus est iocundum," (The time has come to celebrate) debating the merits of chastity and abandon. Entering with a more than two-octave leap to a pianissimo high C on the word "Dulcissime" the solo soprano succumbs to her lover. In the addendum to Part 3, "Blanziflor et Helena," a hymn to the beauty of Helen and Venus, Orff employs the full chorus and orchestra,   and finally brings the wheel of Fortune around full circle with the reprise of "O Fortuna.". Copyright © Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2014