Carl Orff

Known primarily for a single work, the rhythmically intense set of choral songs titled Carmina Burana, German composer Carl Orff (1895–1982) developed a unique conception of musical structure and performance that had many manifestations beyond that single work. One lasting product of Orff's original thinking was not a piece of music but the internationally popular system of music education called Orff Schulwerk.

The crossover success of Carmina Burana, especially its monumental "O Fortuna" opening chorus, has somewhat obscured the fact that Orff was, in several respects, a composer ahead of his time. Carmina Burana was based on a set of medieval poems, and Orff was one of the first composers to look to the distant past of European music and culture for inspiration. Orff pioneered a stripped-down musical language that anticipated the minimalist style of the last decades of the twentieth century, and he believed in merging music with other arts to create a total performance experience much like what would later become common in the music video. Orff anticipated a strong interest among classical musicians regarding non-Western drums and percussion instruments, and his works often had a ritual feel that would have been more at home in the 1960s and 1970s than in Orff's troubled homeland of Germany at mid-century. Carmina Burana, one of the most popular concert works of the twentieth century, also seems one of its most unusual when it is understood in relation to the rest of Orff's output.

Grew Up in Military Family

Born July 10, 1895, Orff grew up in Munich, Germany, a city he made his home for almost his entire life. His father and grandfather were both military officers. Very early in life Orff showed signs of musical ability and creativity of an unusual kind. When he was three, he wrote a poem that he planned to read at his grandfather's birthday party. But then he forgot the poem. "I could have wept," he later wrote (as quoted by Matthew Gurewitsch in the Atlantic Monthly), "but to cry in front of grandfather—that I did not want to do. So I grabbed his trouser legs and shook them with all my might, like a plum tree. Everybody laughed, but my grandfather did not laugh. He bent down to me and said, 'Thank you. I understand very well what you wanted to say.'" Orff sometimes liked to bang on the keys of the family piano with a mallet—annoying, perhaps, but a foretaste of what was to come.

Orff started studying the piano at age five and also took organ and cello lessons. But he was always unmotivated as a performance student, and he found creating original music much more interesting. Orff wrote and staged puppet shows for his family, devising original music for piano, violin, zither, and glockenspiel to go with them. He had a short story published in a children's magazine in 1905 and started to write a book about nature. In his spare time he enjoyed collecting insects. By the time he was a teenager, Orff was writing songs, although he had never studied harmony or composition; his mother helped him set down his first works in musical notation. He wrote the texts himself, and he learned the art of composing not from a teacher but by studying the great works of classical music on his own.

When Orff was 16, some of his music was published; many of his youthful works were songs, often in the settings of texts by famous German poets. They fell into the patterns laid down by Richard Strauss and other leading German composers of the day, but they contained hints of Orff's distinctive language. In 1912 Orff wrote a large choral work, Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, based on a passage in a philosophical work by Friedrich Nietzsche), and an opera, Gisei, das Opfer (Gisei: The Sacrifice), the following year. He heard the Impressionist music of French composer Claude Debussy and began to cultivate the use of unusual combinations of instruments in his orchestration.

Another major formative experience for Orff came in 1915, when he got a job as rehearsal leader and conductor at the Munich Kammerspiele (Chamber Players) theater. At the time, plays were often presented with live musical accompaniment, much like a later film soundtrack. The experience cemented Orff's view of music as a component of a total artistic experience, and he began working on a quasioperatic adaptation of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. The work was not finished until 1939, but parts of Orff's basic creative outlook were forged early in his career. Drafted into the German army in 1917 at the height of World War I, Orff was unhappy despite his family background. He was wounded, suffered from stress, and was finally declared unfit for duty. Orff spent the last year of the war in theatrical jobs in the German cities of Mannheim and Darmstadt, and then returned to Munich.

Studied Music of Renaissance and Baroque Eras

The final component of Orff's mature style was added to his creative arsenal when he began studying musicology under the guidance of two of Germany's leading scholars, Heinrich Kaminski and Curt Sachs. His primary areas of interest were music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—rare specialties at the time—and, to a lesser extent, ethnomusicology. In the latter field, he was fascinated by the array of percussion instruments from around the world that he encountered after meeting Sachs; he attended African dance performances and experimented with the drums that were used to accompany them.

In the mid-1920s Orff began to formulate a concept he called elementare Musik, or elemental music, which was based on the unity of the arts symbolized by the ancient Greek Muses (who gave music its English name) and involved tone, dance, poetry, image, design, and theatrical gesture. Like many other composers of the time he was influenced by the Russian-French emigré Igor Stravinsky. But while others followed the cool, balanced "neoclassic" works of Stravinsky, it was works like the composer's Les noces (The Wedding), a pounding, quasi-folkloric evocation of prehistoric wedding rites, that appealed to Orff. He also began adapting musical works of earlier eras for contemporary theatrical presentation, including Claudio Monteverdi's opera Orfeo (1607). Orff's German version, Orpheus, was staged in 1925 in Mannheim, Germany, under Orff's direction, using some of the instruments that had been used in the original 1607 performance. The passionately declaimed opera of Monteverdi's era was almost unknown in the 1920s, however, and Orff's production met with reactions ranging from incomprehension to ridicule.

Orff also involved himself in educational efforts. With dancer Dorothee Günther he formed the Güntherschule in Munich in 1924. This was a progressive dance and gymnastics school that had the goal of involving children in music-making as well as movement. Orff created new materials for the school, including adaptations of German folk songs (later adaptations of his method in other countries would stress the importance of using local roots music), percussion exercises, and eventually a battery of simple percussion instruments. Orff codified his materials into a large manual called the Orff-Schulwerk (Orff Educational Method), which was published in stages between 1932 and 1935. Orff music education caught on in other countries, including the United States; one estimate in the 1990s put the number of U.S. teachers trained in the method at five thousand.

Orff continued to stage innovative reimaginings of works from the earlier eras of classical music, and his new productions gained greater popularity than did his Monteverdi experiments. He presented a St. Luke Passion, thought erroneously at the time to be by Johann Sebastian Bach, in an innovative staged version in the Munich area; the original work had dramatic dialogue but would normally have been sung in concert, not staged. Orff turned it into what would now be called a multimedia production, setting the story of Christ's life among south German peasants and illustrating it with projections of centuries-old woodcuts from the area. The Lukaspassion caught on in Bavaria and is now staged annually in April as a traditional event.

Set Latin Love Poems

Around 1930 Orff became fascinated by love poetry in the Latin language, some of which had erotic subject matter. He wrote two sets of unaccompanied choral songs to texts by the ancient Roman poet Catullus, the Catulli Carmina (Songs of Catullus), in 1930 and 1931. This music prepared the way for Orff's masterpiece, the Carmina Burana of 1937. This work was based on medieval Latin poems contained in the so-called Benediktbeuern manuscript, housed in a Bavarian monastery. The title Carmina Burana (Songs of Beuren) refers to the manuscript, and though the texts were originally written by religious students, they have a strongly secular outlook, celebrating pleasures of the flesh, lamenting the bad luck that befalls human beings, and sometimes poking fun at religion. Orff brought together all the strands of his musical education, opening the work with an imposing chorus addressing Fortuna, the Roman goddess of luck, and delivering a work filled with arresting music, kinetic rhythms, and effective arrangements for both adult and children's choruses. Like the St. Luke Passion, it was accompanied at its premiere by slide-projected images; Orff called them imagines magicae, or magic images.

The work has been a resounding worldwide success ever since its premiere, and even seven decades later, lawyers for Orff's estate are kept busy fighting the unauthorized uses of the music, which is still under copyright. At the time, however, it was harshly condemned by Nazi-oriented critic Herbert Gerigk. Orff, who remained in Germany during the Nazi era while many other composers departed, has sometimes been criticized as a collaborator with fascism. He never joined the Nazi party, and his music found little official favor within Hitler's cultural apparatus. His detractors point to his 1939 music for A Midsummer Night's Dream; the most famous music for the play had been written by Felix Mendelssohn, a German composer of Jewish background, and Orff's work was seen as an attempt to provide a purely Aryan replacement for the Mendelssohn score.

Orff regarded Carmina Burana as the real beginning of his career, and ordered his publisher to destroy all his previous works (an instruction that fortunately was disregarded). After World War II he continued to explore ancient texts and their possibilities for generating a new musical and ritual language. Carmina Burana, another set of Catulli Carmina songs (1941–43), and a like-minded work called Trionfo di Afrodite (The Triumph of Aphrodite), were assembled by Orff into a massive three-part theatrical piece called Trionfi in the early 1950s. After Carmina Burana he wrote two theater pieces based on German fairy tales: Der Mond (The Moon, 1938) and Die Kluge: Die Geschichte von dem König und der klugen Frau (The Clever Girl: The Story of the King and the Clever Girl, 1942). The latter opera was based on the well-known folk tale of a peasant girl who marries a king after solving a series of riddles.

Most of Orff's later works—Antigonae (1949), Oedipus der Tyrann (Oedipus the King, 1958), Prometheus desmotes (1967), and De temporum fine comoedia (A Play for the End of Time, 1971)—were based on texts or topics from antiquity. They extend the language of Carmina Burana in interesting ways, but they are expensive to stage and are not operas in the conventional sense. They are occasionally performed, most often in Germany. Orff's major contributions remain the much-performed Carmina Burana and the Orff-Schulwerk system. Orff died in Munich on March 29, 1982.

Books

Contemporary Musicians, vol. 21, Gale, 1998.

Liess, Andreas, Carl Orff, translated by Adelheid and Herbert Parkin, Calder and Boyars, 1966.

Sadie, Stanley, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., Macmillan, 2001.

Periodicals

Atlantic Monthly, August 1995.

Dance Magazine, September 1994.

Online

"Biography," http://www.orff.de (February 8, 2006).