Carl Orff

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(b Munich, 10 July 1895; d there, 29 March 1982). German composer. He studied at the Munich Academy and later, in 1920, with Kaminski. In 1924, with Dorothee Günther, he founded a school for gymnastics, music and dance, and out of this came his later activity in providing materials for young children to make music, using their voices and simple percussion instruments. His adult works also seek to make contact with primitive kinds of musical behaviour, as represented by ostinato, pulsation and direct vocal expression of emotion; in this he was influenced by Stravinsky (Oedipus rex, The Wedding), though the models are coarsened to produce music of a powerful pagan sensual appeal and physical excitement. All his major works, including the phenomenally successful Carmina burana (1937), were designed as pageants for the stage; they include several versions of Greek tragedies and Bavarian comedies.

works:
Dramatic music

• Carmina burana (1937)
• Der Mond (1939)
• Catulli carmine (1943)
• Die Kluge(1943)
• Die Bernauerin (1947)
• Antigonae (1949)
• Astutuli (1953)
• Trionfo di Afrodite (1953)
• Comoedia de Christi resurrectione (1957)
• Oedipus de Tyrann (1959)
• Ludus de nato infante mirificus (1960)
• Ein Sommernachtstraum (1964)
• Prometheus (1966)
• De temporum fine comoedia (1973)

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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).

Orff, Carl (b Munich, 10 July 1895, d Munich, 29 Mar. 1982). German composer. He wrote no ballet music, although his theatre works often used an element of dance. His great triptych, in particular—Carmina Burana, Catulli Carmina, and Trionfo di Afrodite—has attracted many choreographers. Gsovsky choreographed the last two, in 1943 and 1953 respectively, while Carmina Burana has been turned into a ballet by Inge Hertling (1937), Erika Hanka (1942), Mary Wigman (1943), Heinz Rosen (1959), John Butler (1959), Fernand Nault (1962), David Bintley (1995), and Damian Woetzel (1997).

Orff, Carl (Munich, 1895-1982, Munich), German composer and teacher of composition. He derived inspiration in part from Renaissance and medieval music. His works include the operas Der Mond (1939) and Die Bernauerin (1946), for both of which he wrote the libretto. He is best known for his ‘trionfi’ Carmina Burana (1937) (see Carmina Burana) and Catulli Carmina (1943). For the Sophoclean Antigone (1949) and Oedipus der Tyrann (1959) he used the translations of F. Hölderlin. His characteristic style, which admits of theatrical or concert presentation, is retained in De temporum fine comoedia (1973).

Orff, Carl (ôrf), 1895-1982, German composer and educator. After studying at the Academy of Music at Munich, he helped to found the Günter School there in 1924. As a composer Orff wished to simplify music, to return to its primitive components. He attempted to adapt old monodic forms to modern tastes, employing dissonant counterpoint and vigorous rhythms. His most famous work is the Carmina Burana (1937), a scenic oratorio derived from a group of medieval poems in German and Latin (see also Goliardic songs). This oratorio forms part of a trilogy that includes Catulli Carmina (1943), a scenic cantata based on the works of Catullus; and Trionfo di Afrodite (1953). Orff's other works include the operas Der Mond [the moon] (1939) and Die Kluge [the wise woman] (1943). From 1960 he was head of the Orff School for Music in Munich. His work in music education has attracted a considerable following in the United States.

Biography

Carl Orff was born into an old Bavarian military family and learned piano, organ, and cello at an early age. His first works show the influence of the Impressionist composers but he soon became drawn to ancient Greek tragedy, the aesthetics of the Baroque period and Christian mystery plays, and traditional Bavarian folk music. His style changed to a spare, direct, modal style with dramatic tension and exuberance expressed outright or just below the surface. This similar texture can be heard in its most refined state in the operas Antigonae (1949), Oedipus der Tyrann (1959), and Ein Sommernachtstraum (1939-1962), but the first piece in which it occurred is still the most compelling and seems to flow directly from the composer's imagination (unlike some later vulgarizations where he plagiarized his first success). This first piece was the popular cantata Carmina Burana (Songs of Beuren, 1937) and the most quoted of all his compositions. Originally conceived for the stage, Carmina Burana is a setting for soloists, chorus, and orchestra (including two pianos) of profane poems in low Latin and German from the 13th century sung by the Benediktbeuern monks. The texts have as their subjects drinking wine, nature, and love. The section most quoted, "Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi," praises Fortune with a muted to full-voiced chorus underscored by a subdued pulsing, skulking rhythmic pedal point (pizzicato strings, piano bass octaves, staccato "toots" from bassoons, and low clarinets). This section is also often imitated (like B. Herrmann's Psycho string slashes, for example) in original scores by other film composers. Carmina Burana excerpts occur in moments of mystery and dementia, such as in Shylock (1999), The General's Daughter (1999), Sady skorpiona (Garden of Scorpions, 1991), The Doors (1991), Excalibur (1981), Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), and Ternos Caçadores (1969) (aka Jailbird). Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's Carmina Burana (1976) is the only filmic realization based on the original work.

The dark humor of Badlands (1973) is wonderfully enhanced by Orff's Musica Poetica for wooden xylophone-like, metal gamelan-like instruments, tympani, and occasional chorus vocals (with words from ancient children's rhymes to the poetry of Sophocles, Goether, and Hölderlin). The universal title Musica poetica was given to the series of ten records of the composer's Schulwerk, music to be played and sung by children, issued by the French label Harmonium Mundi between 1963 and 1975. The Orff-Schulwerk became renown in educational work throughout the world. It was based on the composer's belief that children should not be taught music in isolation from kinetic movement, theater, and speech. In Badlands, the character Holly's offscreen narration throughout the movie concerning her adventures with her gentle, sociopathic boyfriend Kit, whom she thinks looks like James Dean in blue jeans, is perfectly accompanied by the Orff music which combines a simple, direct naivety of harmony and rhythm with a conceptuality foreign to the badlands of 1959 Montana. Especially effective is the use of an old folk song-setting in Phrygian mode that highlights the burning of Holly's house after Kit has shot her father. Other music by Erik Satie, James Taylor, George Tipton, and Nat "King" Cole fill out the soundtrack.

Tony Scott's True Romance (1993) makes similar use of pieces from the Orff-Schulwerk to accompany the adventures of Clarence and Alabama in this crime-drama-romance.

Another style that arises occasionally in Orff's works is that of the grotesque and surreal, heard in Der Mond and the anti-Fascist Die Kluge. His Trionfo di Afrodite appears in an adapted version in Liquid Sky (1982). Unfortunately, there are no biopics concerning this often controversial composer. ~ "Blue" Gene Tyranny, Rovi

For The Record...

Born, July 10, 1895, in Munich, Germany; died of cancer, March 29, 1982, in Munich, Germany; son of Heinrich and Paula (Koestler) Orff; married to Lise Lotte; children: Godela (daughter). Education: Received degree from the Akademie der Tonkunst (Academy of Music), Munich, 1915; studied with Heinrich Kaminski, early 1920s. Composer and music teacher; assistant Kapellmeister, or orchestra conductor, at the Muenchener Kammerspiele, 1915-17; also served in the same position at the Nationaltheater, Mannheim, and at the Landestheater, Darmstadt, both from 1918-19; co-founded Guenther Schule, Munich, with Dorothea Guenther, 1924; first work for the stage was Klage der Ariadne, which premiered in Karlsruhe, Germany, 1925; was active in Munich’s Bach Society in the early 1930s and served as its director until 1934; taught a master class at Munich’s Hochschule fuer Musik, 1950-60; was an instructor at the Orff School for Music at the Mozarteum Academy for Music and Dramatic Art in Salzburg, Austria, instructor, for over a decade, beginning in 1949; later served as its director until his death in 1982; received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Tuebingen (1955) and Munich (1972). Awards: Munich Music Prize, 1947; New York Music Critics’ Prize, 1954, for Carmina Burana; Bremen Music Prize, 1956; Order pour le Merite for Science and Art, West Germany, 1956; Cross of Merit, 1959; Mozart Prize, Basel Goethe foundation, 1969.

Classical composer, music educator

The work of German composer Carl Orff predates the late twentieth-century renewal of interest in the haunting, unusual melodies of medieval-era religious music by several decades. In the 1930s, Orff was composing works for the stage based on medieval Latin chants, and later revived the classic tales of love, lust, and blood from ancient Greek drama for modern audiences. Yet Orff’s most famous work remains Carmina Burana, a 1937 homage to life’s more earthy pleasures based on a long-lost collection of medieval songs. The melodies he adapted into the stirring Carmina Burana have entered popular culture in the form of background music for television commercials and entrance pomp at sporting events. "Orff’s chorus seems to transcend period, place, authorship, even meaning," wrote Matthew Gurewitsch of Carmina Burana’s lasting legacy in the Atlantic Monthly. "Part paean, part lament, it purrs and roars like some titanic flywheel. This is chant the cosmos might sing to itself, as impersonal as a landslide or a tidal wave. The din it makes has all but obliterated its maker."

Orff was born in the Bavarian capital of Munich on July 10, 1895, into a long line of military officers in service to the local princes or the German kaiser. Orff, however, strayed down a far different path from an early age, perhaps inspired by the rich and varied offerings Munich offered to music-lovers. He began piano lessons at age of five, and also took up the organ and cello. As a child he began writing his own musical compositions, and loved to stage puppet shows for his household. As a teenager he set verse by German Romantic poets Friedrich Hoelderlin and Heinrich Heine to music, and had his first compositions published in 1911. He graduated from Munich’s music academy, the Akademie der Tonkunst in 1914, and at the age of 20 took a job as the assistant Kapellmeister, or orchestra conductor, at the famed Muenchener Kammerspiele.

Orff stayed at the Kammerspiele from 1915 to 1917, but was drafted into the German Army during the last year of World War I. The long military traditions of the Orff family seemed to have genetically bypassed him, and the demands of war tested him greatly. The following year, upon his return to civilian life and the end of the war, Orff became assistant Kapellmeister at the Nationaltheater in Mannheim, as well as holding the same position at the Landestheater (State Theater) in nearby Darmstadt. In 1919, he returned to Munich and began teaching music; he also studied under Heinrich Kaminski, and it was through this avenue that Orff became interested in Renaissance-era music.

In 1924 Orff and gymnast Dorothea Guenther founded a Munich school for children whose legacy would continue long after their deaths. The Guenther Schule’s aim

was to teach music to children by a set of aesthetic-awareness principles Orff and Guenther had formulated, based on the idea that nearly all human beings are "musical" by nature. Orff wrote the treatise Schulwerk, which explained these theories and gave teachers a curriculum of songs and activities employing German folk songs and poetry. Even in the late twentieth century, thousands of teachers aroundthe world are certified in the program, and translated versions of Schulwerk incorporate the folklore and literature of each culture. Orff also developed easy-to-learn percussion instruments to use in the program.

Orff penned a number of works for the stage during the 1920s. His adaptation of one of opera’s first great works, Orpheus, was performed in Mannheim in 1925 with some of the original instruments used in Claudio Monteverdi’s 1607 production. The city of Karlsruhe hosted the debuts for Orff’s Klage der Ariadne ("Ariadne’s Lament") and Tanz der Sproeden ("Dance of the Merciless Beauties"), also adaptations of Monteverdi operas, in 1925 as well. In the late 1920s, Orff was preoccupied in writing Schulwerk; in 1930, the same year its first part was published, Orff was named conductor of Munich’s Bach Society. In 1931 he adapted a Bach passion play into a controversial stage version set in rural Bavaria, the maligned St. Luke Passion, which set the story of Christ among southern German peasantry.

Fame came to Orff, however, with the 1937 debut of Carmina Burana, and the stage work marked a radical new direction in his career as well: he even wrote his publisher instructing him to destroy all his previous works, since the composer felt that his career rightly began here. Carmina Burana, or the "Songs of Beuren," was Orff’s adaptation of a codex discovered in the archives of a Bavarian monastery in 1803. The manuscript was a collection of songs written down in the thirteenth century, and reflects the popular tastes of that age in its lyrics from wandering minstrels and spoofs written by the Benedictine monks. In the original Vulgar Latin, Old French, and Middle High German, its 200 songs poke fun at organized religion or celebrate carnal pursuits. Others reflect a love of nature or life’s gustatory pleasures—a goose on a spit, for instance, sings a comic lament over the fire. The plotless stage work Orff created from this used only about ten percent of the original manuscript—much of it the risqué text—and its performance, though dance and pantomime, won him great praise upon its debut in 1937.

Orff and Hitler’s Germany
Carmina Burana, it should be noted, was first staged in Frankfurt am Main’s opera house during the height of Nazi power in Germany. Most of the country’s artists of this era—the composers, painters, or writers who were not Jewish and had not emigrated—found themselves bound to a strict ideology to celebrate "German" traits in their work. Artists who kept out of trouble during this period have sometimes been looked upon as quasi-collaborators with the fascist regime, and Orff’s name has often been mentioned in the same sentence as the phrase "Nazi composer."

Orff, however, was certainly aware of the necessity to keep out of trouble during this time, and it seems unlikely that he was a "favorite" of anyone in power, with the Nazi leadership better remembered for its fondness toward the operas of Richard Wagner. In 1934, when the Munich Bach Society came increasingly under the control of a Nazi group, the Kampfbund, Orff resigned his director’s post. The Kampfbund was a government agency set up to weed out modernist or "Jewish" tendencies in all aspects of the arts in Germany.

Furthermore, around the time of Carmina Burana’s premier, Orff came to the attention of Heinz Drewes, the newly appointed head of the music section of the ministry of propaganda for the German government. The functionary, according to Michael H. Kater in The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich, "took an immediate dislike to Orff and, while never censuring outright any of the composer’s current or future works, successfully intimidated him, keeping him in abeyance until well into the war." Later, Orff would write Astutuli, completed in 1945. This allegorical tale slyly criticizing Hitler and the Third Reich was not staged, however, until 1953.

Though he is best remembered for Carmina Burana, Orff wrote several other works for the stage. Reflecting his interest in medieval music—the chants of the Gregorian monks, for example—Orff’s compositions were repetitious in tone, and often described as "primitive" or "skeletal." The same note might be played continuously, taking minimalist music to new extremes; a performer might be required to sing a "C" 200 times straight in other instances. Orchestras for Orff’s compositions usually consisted of a heavy percussion section and banks of pianos, with their pianists instructed in the notation to smash the keys with vigor.

Wrote Work for Actress Daughter
As with Carmina Burana, Orff enjoyed the challenge of adapting works from unusual sources. In 1939’s Der Mond ("The Moon"), which he based on a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, four men steal the moon, with predictably disastrous consequences. Die Kluge: The Story of the King and the Wise Woman, which had its first performance in 1943, told the story of a farmer’s daughter who gains the love of a despot by solving his riddles. Orff penned Die Bernauerin ("The Tragedy of Agnes Bernauer") for his daughter Godela, an actress. It premiered in Stuttgart in 1947 and is still performed annually in the Bavarian city of Augsburg, where some of it is set. In this harsh tale, recounted by a chorus of male witches, the title character is an impoverished young woman from the lower classes who wins the heart of a duke and marries him. For this she is despised as a villain and then lynched.

Orff also adapted the works of others besides Monteverdi and Grimm. His version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Ein Sommernachtstraum, debuted in 1939 but was revised by Orff a total of six times over the next four decades. Later in his career Orff took the works of the ancient Greek playwrights—upon which the very principles of opera were based—and adapted them for the modern German stage. To do so he used translations from the Greek undertaken in the late eighteenth century by the poet Hoelderlin, whom modern scholars have theorized probably suffered from schizophrenia. Hoelderlin, according to Gurewitsch in the 1995 Atlantic Monthly essay, "mimicked the original Greek with breathtaking disdain for accepted German usage, creating in effect a language within a language." Orff’s Greek adaptations include Antigonae (1949) Oedipus der Tyrann (1959), both by Sophocles.

Carmina Burana premiered to American audiences in the late 1950s, and won Orff greatacclaim. He continued to adapt the work of the Greek dramatists during the latter years of his career; Prometheus (after Aeschylus), debuted in Stuttgart in 1966. One of his last works was written for the 1972 Summer Olympic Games held in Munich. Orff was married more than once and enjoyed his last years on his home on the Lake Ammersee outside Munich. He died of cancer in 1982. A concert hall in Munich, part of a contemporary arts center and home of the Munich Philharmonic, is named in his honor.

Selected discography
Monteverdi Realisation: Lamento d’Arianna, Deutsche Grammophon.
Carmina Burana: Scenic Cantata (with the Bavarian Radio Chorus and Orchestra; title means "Songs of Beuren"), Deutsche Grammophon.
Entrata (with the Viennese State Opera Orchestra), Westminster.
Der Mond: A Narration with Four Episodes (title means "The Moon"), Columbia.
Die Kluge: The Story of the King and the Wise Woman, Angel.
Catulli Carmina: Ludi Scaenici, Deutsche Grammophon.
Die Bernauerin: Ein Bairisches Stueck, Deutsche Grammophon.
Antigonae: Setting of Hoelderlin’s Vision of Sophocles’ Tragedy, Deutsche Grammophon.
Trionfo di Afrodite: Concerto Scenico, Deutsche Grammophon.
Music for Children, Volumes 1 & 2, Columbia, Volumes 5 & 6, Mundi 2-Harmo.

Selected writings
Klage der Ariadne (after Monteverdi; title means “Ariadne’s Lament”), Karlsruhe, 1925; rev., Gera, 1940.

Orpheus (after Monteverdi), Mannheim, 1925; rev., Munich, 1931; rev., Dresden, 1940.

Tanz der Sproeden (after Monteverdi; title means “Dance of the Merciless Beauties”), Karlsruhe, 1925; rev., Gera, 1940.

St. Luke Passion (after Bach), Munich, 1931.

Carmina Burana (cantiones profanae, medieval Lain lyrics), Frankfurt, 1937.

Der Mond (kleines Welttheater, after Brothers Grimm), Munich, 1939.

Catulli Carmina (luda scaenici; title means “Songs of Catullus”), Leipzig, 1943.

Die Kluge (title means “The Clever Woman”), Frankfurt, 1943.

Die Bernauerin: Bairische Stueck (title means “The Tragedy of Agnes Bernauer”), Stuttgart, 1947.

Antigonae (Sophocles, trans. Hoelderlin), Salzburg, 1949.

Astutuli: Bairsiche Komoedie, Munich, 1953.



Trionfo di Afrodite (concerto scenario; title means “The Triumph of Aphrodite”), Milan, 1953.

Trionfi (includes Carmina Burana, Catulli carmina, Trionfo di Afrodite; title means “Triumphs”), Salzburg, 1953.

Comoedia de Christi resurrectione (Osterspiel), Stuttgart, 1957.

Lamenti (includes Klage der Ariadne, Orpheus, Tanz der Sproeden), Schwetzingen, 1958.

Oedipus der Tyrann (Sophocles, transl. Hoelderlin), Stuttgart, 1959.

Ludus de nat infante mirificus (Weihnachtsspiel), Stuttgart, 1960.

Ein Sommernachtstraum (after Shakespeare), 1939-62; final version, Stuttgart, 1964.

Prometheus (after Aeschylus), Stuttgart, 1966.

De temporum fine comoedia (Buehnenspiel; title means “Play of the End of Time”), Salzburg, 1973.

Sources
Books
Kater, Michael H., The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich, Oxford University Press, 1997.
Liess, Andreas, Carl Orff, translated by Adelheid and Herbert Parkin, Calder and Boyars, 1966.
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie (Volume 13: Muwashsha-Ory), Macmillan, 1980.

Periodicals
Atlantic Monthly, August 1995, pp. 90-93.
New York Times, March 31, 1982, p. B5.

• Genres: Choral Music, Miscellaneous Music, Opera

Biography

Although his fame rests on the success of a single work, the famous and frequently commercially mutilated Carmina Burana, Carl Orff was in fact a multi-faceted musician and prolific composer who wrote in many styles before developing the primal, driving language which informs his most famous work. In addition to his fame as the creator of Carmina burana, Orff enjoyed international renown as the world's pre-eminent authority on children's music education, his life's work in that area represented by Musik für Kinder, five eclectic collections of music to be performed by children, eventually developing into a more extensive series known as Orff Schulwerk.

Born in 1895 to an old Bavarian family, Orff studied piano and cello while still a young boy. He later studied at the Munich Academy of Music, graduating in 1914. The music that he composed during this period shows the influence of several composers, including Debussy and Richard Strauss. In 1914, Orff was appointed Kapellmeister at the Munich Kammerspiele, where he remained until joining the military in 1917. Discharged from service the following year, Orff continued to work as a conductor, accepting further positions in Mannheim and Darmstadt during the 1918-1919 seasons. Returning to Munich in 1919, Orff studied composition privately with Heinrich Kaminski while supporting himself as a teacher. In 1924, he founded the Güntherschule for music and dance with Dorothee Günther, dedicating himself to making musical performance accessible to children. Under his guidance, an entire orchestra of special "Orff instruments" was designed, enabling children to play music without formal training. The following year, Orff made three stage adaptations of works by Monteverdi. Continuing his work in the area of Baroque music, Orff became conductor of the Munich Bach society in 1930, a position he held until 1933. The experience of performing Baroque music, particularly sacred works for the stage, convinced Orff that an effective musical performance must fuse music, words and movement, a goal no doubt partly inspired by his work with the Güntherschule. Orff embodied his conception of music in the fabulously successful Carmina Burana (1937), which in many ways defined him as a composer. Based on an important collection of Latin and German Goliard poems found in the monastery of Benediktbeuren, this work exemplifies Orff's search for an idiom that would reveal the elemental power of music, allowing the listener to experience music as an overwhelming, primitive force. Goliard poetry, which not only celebrates love and wine, but also pokes fun at the clergy, perfectly suited Orff's desire to create a musical work appealing to a fundamental musicality that, as he believed, every human being possesses. Eschewing melodic development and harmonic complexity, and articulating his musical ideas through basic sonorities and easily discernible rhythmic patterns, Orff created an idiom which many found irresistible. The perceived "primitivism" of Carmina burana notwithstanding, Orff believed that the profound appeal of music is not merely physical. This belief is reflected by many other works, including musical dramas based on Greek tragedies, namely, Antigonae (1949), Oedipus der Tyrann (1959), and Prometheus (1966). These works, as well as some compositions on Christian themes, followed the composer's established dramatic and compositional techniques, but failed to repeat the tremendous success of Carmina burana. His last work, De temporum fine comoedia (A Comedy About the End of Time) premiered at the 1973 Salzburg Festival. Nine years later, Carl Orff died in Munich, where he had spent his entire life. ~ All Music Guide, Rovi

Discography

Carl Orff: Orpheus (Carl Orff's Original Authorized Recording) Buy this CD

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