| Carmina Burana | ||||||||
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Carmina Burana “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.” 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, in this and in his later stage works Orff aimed 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. Orff is also known for his educational program of music and dance for schoolchildren, called 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, 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 and Europe. 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 of Benediktbeuern 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 lacus colueram" (Once I lived in a lake) – 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." | ||||||||
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Francesca da Rimini, Op. 32 Dante’s Inferno served as a great inspiration to artists of the Romantic era. The story of illicit love of Francesca da Rimini from the Fifth Canto had a special appeal to Tchaikovsky, whose illicit homosexual loves tortured him throughout his life. Francesca, married to the domineering hunchback Gianciotto Malatesta, Lord of Rimini, is seduced by Gianciotto’s brother Paolo while the two are reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. When Gianciotto, returning from the hunt, catches the lovers in their illicit tryst, he slaughters them both. Francesca da Rimini started in 1876 as a project for an opera when Tchaikovsky received a libretto on the subject from his friend the writer and music critic Hermann Laroche. But other projects intervened, including his work on the ballet Swan Lake, and Tchaikovsky abandoned it for lack of time. Instead, at the suggestion of his brother Modest, he decided to compose an orchestral work around the story. He wrote to his brother: “I wrote it with love and think that love has come through the music quite well.” Tchaikovsky followed Dante’s description of his encounter with the souls of the lovers in the second circle of Hell, which the poet designated as the site for the punishment of sins of the flesh (Other residents were Helen of Troy, Paris and Cleopatra.) The composer was also influenced by the illustration by Gustave Doré for an 1861 edition of Dante’s Commedia, depicting the eternal tempest which buffets Paolo and Francesca, eternally physically conjoined to each other but unable to consummate their love. Tchaikovsky’s score is a musical dramatization, not of the actual incident that condemns the two lovers, but rather of Francesca’s recalling it to Dante in Hell. Therefore, the whirlwind is a constant dominating presence in the music. The first part of Canto V describes how the monster Minos judges and condemns each damned soul to a circle of Hell meting out appropriate punishment (contrapasso) for his or her sin. Because Tchaikovsky was so meticulous in his setting of each part of the Fifth Canto, we have decided here to give the entire canto in a translation by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, somewhat archaic but accurate. The musical icons are placed where Tchaikovsky "quoted" the text. In a slow, threatening introduction, Tchaikovsky introduces a "damnation" Leitmotif. The tone poem begins with the musical portrayal of the wailing souls before Minos's throne as he hurls each one to its doom. After Dante and Virgil descend to the Second Circle, by Divine Will the tempest abates only as Francesca, portrayed in a mournful clarinet solo, begins her story. The love theme is poignantly seductive – as was the story of Lancelot for the doomed lovers and of Francesca’s tale to Dante. It takes up most of the central part of the tone poem, but at the sound of a hunting horn, the murder quickly ensues and the lovers are instantly judged and cast into the whirlwind, while Dante faints in morally inappropriate sympathy. (Musical examples are located next to the verses of the Canto that Tchaikovsky depicts in music.) Inferno: Canto V | ||||||||
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| Copyright © Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2010 | ||||||||
