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).

• Period: Modern (1910-1949)
• Country: Germany
• Born: July 10, 1895 in Munich, Germany
• Died: March 29, 1982 in Munich, Germany
• 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 a 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. ~ AMG, All Music Guide

Discography

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

• Born: Jul 10, 1895 in Munich, Germany
• Died: Mar 29, 1982 in Munich, Germany
• Active: '90s
• Major Genres: Music, Avant-garde / Experimental
• Career Highlights: Sady Skorpiona, Seiji Ozawa: Carmina Burana
• First Major Screen Credit: Seiji Ozawa: Carmina Burana (1990)

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, All Movie Guide

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