Carl Orff: Carmina Burana - "O Fortuna"

In 1934, a second-hand books’ dealer presented the German composer Carl Orff with a volume of medieval poems that came from an ancient manuscript. The manuscript –known now as the Burana codex– was discovered in the Benedictine monastery of Beuern in 1803 but its date is very much earlier. The collection contained more than two hundred poems from the XII and XIII centuries written in medieval Latin, and another fifty in German with a mixture of Latin or French vernacular.

The composer was deeply impressed with the vitality of the poems, and took 25 out of them to build a different music, rhythmically powerful to the point of appearing almost primitive. The final work was premiered on June 8, 1937, with the extensive title: “Carmina Burana: Secular songs for singers and choruses to be sung together with instruments and magical images”.

Carl  Orff (1895 - 1982)

Certainly, it was not the first work composed by Orff, but as a result of the success and international recognition that Carmina achieved, the composer decided to withdraw the entire oeuvre he had composed before 1934.
From then on, he understood, his prestige should be based on the authorship of scenic dramas. A meticulous and careful sample of this will be given by a fertile production successfully completed in 1971 with the drama Play on the End of Times.
In the meantime, three popular works would stand out: the aforementioned Carmina Burana, Trionfo di Afrodite, and Catulli Carmina (poems of Catullus).

The "goliard" texts
For the most part anonymous, the poems included in the original collection of the "Songs of Beurn" (Carmina Burana), sing indifferently to love, wine or nature. Satirical and "didactic" ones are also involved.
Their texts are generically called "Goliards", a word used in the Middle Ages to refer to vagabond clerics, monks living a loose life and poor students who proliferated in Europe with the rise of urban life and the emergence of universities in the 13th century. The result is, indeed, a carefree poetic work, even rude, that was sung in the streets, taverns, or university “comparsas”. Never, of course, inside the church.

“O Fortuna”
In Carmina, the tunes are repeated in each stanza almost without variants, making its rhythmic richness constitutes its most important feature. Its best-known section is the O Fortuna fragment, which is sung at the beginning and end of the work.

The rendering is by the Johann Strauss Orchestra, conducted by André Rieu, in Maastricht, the year 2012, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the orchestra’s founding, in 1987, by Rieu himself.

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