Carl Orff

Carl Orff owes his posterity to his famous cantata Carmina Burana, a completely anachronistic work in the middle of the 20th century. He was born into a military family in Munich on July 10, 1895. His parents, both musicians, encouraged him to learn the piano from the age of five, followed by the cello and organ. Attracted more by operatic art than by the outdated formalism of Academy of Music courses, he attended Wagner's opera Die Fliegende Holländer in 1909, the premiere of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde in 1911 and a performance ofElektra conducted by Richard Strauss in 1914, the year he graduated from Anton Beer-Walbrunn's class. After composing lieder on texts by German poets and the lyric Zarathustra (1912), he set to work on an opera inspired by a Japanese play, Gisei, under the dual influence of Claude Debussy and Arnold Schönberg, which was brought to the stage in 2010. He continued his training with piano lessons with Hermann Zilcher and prepared for conducting. He was appointed musical director of the Münchner Kammerspiele when the call-up for war came, but a wound resulting in partial paralysis released him from his military obligations. He returned to the Mannheim and Darmstadt theaters (1918-1919), before resigning to devote himself to composition. In 1920, he married Alice Solscher, with whom he had a daughter named Godela, before separating six months later and divorcing in 1927. His early research into global performance led him to draw up the concept of "elementary music", uniting music, poetry, theater and visual arts in the ancient manner. In 1924, he founded the Günther-Schule with gymnast Dorothee Günther, and turned his attention to music education for young people, as demonstrated by his Schulwerk method (1930), which served as the basis for the creation of schools around the world under the name Orff-Schulwerk. This period also saw him work on the German adaptation of Monteverdi's opera Orfeo (1607), which became Orpheus and was premiered on period instruments in Mannheim in 1925, long before this became the custom decades later, but Orff met with nothing but criticism when it was staged a second time in Munich in 1929. In 1930, he began composing a series of five cantatas, Werkbuch I and Werkbuch II, to librettos by Franz Werfel and Bertolt Brecht. In 1935, Orff set about composing the work that would make him world-famous, a cantata in Latin, medieval German and Old French based on twenty-four poems taken from a 13th-century work, Carmina Burana ("Songs of Beuren"), from Benediktbeuern Abbey in Bavaria. Inspired by Renaissance composers and Stravinsky's ballet Les Noces, he deliberately chose to add accessible music, far removed from contemporary complexities, such as the introductory chorus O Fortuna, which has been taken up in pop, rap, metal and electro versions. Since its premiere at the Frankfurt Opera on July 8, 1937, the work has enjoyed great success and spectacular stagings, overshadowing all the rest of the composer's output, and in particular the other two parts of the Trionfi triptych of which it is a part, Catulli Carmina (1943) and Trionfo di Afrodite (1953). Meanwhile, Orff adapted for the stage two fairy tales by the Grimm brothers, Der Mond (1938) and Die Kluge (1942), and a German version of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream , Ein Sommernachtstraum (1939), which was constantly reworked until the final version in 1962. During the Nazi regime, Carl Orff's work was the object of particular interest in Germany, initially rejected for its recurrent use of percussion deemed too exotic, and for the erotic passages in Carmina Burana, before being embraced to the point of making him an example of an Aryan composer. He was commissioned to compose an anthem for the 1936 Berlin Olympics, opening the debate on his commitment or complacency towards the powers that be. Although he neither joined the Nazi Party nor held an official position, he had to register with the Reichmusikkammer, like all musicians under the Third Reich. At the time of denazification, he made it known that he and his friend, professor and folklorist Kurt Huber, who was arrested and executed in 1943, were deeply involved in the White Rose (Weiß Rose) resistance movement, without being active members. In 1946, he was finally classified by the authorities as an "acceptable Gray C", but historians continue to debate the issue. After the war, Orff composed the lyric Die Bernauerin (1947), based on the life of Agnes Bernauer, mistress of the Bavarian Duke Albrecht III, followed by the Bavarian comedy Atustuli (1953). His work also focused on musical adaptations of ancient plays, with Antigonae, after Sophocles, premiered at the Salzburg Festival on August 9, 1949 under the direction of Ferenc Fricsay; then Oedipus der Tyrann after the same Greek author, premiered in Stuttgart on December 11, 1959 by Ferdinand Leitner; the opera Prometheus after Aeschylus, premiered in the same city and with the same conductor on March 24, 1968; then De temporum fine comoedia, somewhere between choral opera and oratorio, which took ten years to compile between 1960 and 1971 and two years to compose, recorded by Herbert von Karajan in July 1973 before its premiere at the Salzburg Festival on August 20 of the same year. In 1961, the Orff Institute, part of the Salzburg Mozarteum, was created as part of his pedagogical work. After his first marriage, Carl Orff remarried three times: to his pupil Gertrud Willert in 1939, whom he divorced in 1953; to author Luise Rinser from 1954 to 1959; and to his secretary Liselotte Schmitz from 1960 until the composer's death from cancer on March 29, 1982, at the age of 86.