Carl Orff (1895-1982) must be counted one of the most successful of twentieth- century composers. Carmina Burana is performed every day of the year and Schulwerk (Schoolwork), his method for teaching music for children, has influenced millions of children all over the world. But these two components of his oeuvre have led separate lives: few fans of Carmina Burana know of Schulwerk. The enormous popularity of Carmina Burana has come at a price, obscuring Orff’s other works. His oeuvre includes operas based on subjects from Greek tragedy (Oedipus, Antigone, Prometheus) and on stories from the Brothers Grimm (Der Mond and Die Kluge) as well dramatic works for choir based on the poems of Catullus and other ancient texts (Catulli Carmina and Trionfi di Afrodite), but thesse are scarcely ever peformed in England. Even Carmina Burana has been reduced to its signature opening, as ubiquitous as the Nokia ring-tone.
Those four triumphant chords followed by a whispered chant and its chugging accompaniment are perhaps most familiar now from the X Factor, contributing an excitement bordering on hysteria. This opening of Carmina Burana has even featured on a Carling Black Label ad, which is the first thing we see in Tony Plamer’s O, Fortuna! Have we wandered into the wrong film? Welcome to the disorienting world of Carl Orff.
Nazi music?
In spite of Orff’s success, or perhaps because of it, histories of music seldom make more than a nod in his direction. And critical opinion has not always been generous: “The kind of music a gland would write, if a gland could write music” is a typical jibe, and no discussion of his music lasts long before someone calls him “a Nazi composer”.
Palmer’s film doesn’t address these criticisms directly, but his engrossing mosaic leaves us with plenty to think about. Interviews, snippets from performances of Orff’s major works, archival footage, Nazi propaganda films, puppet shows, home movies-- all of these are juxtaposed without comment or narrative. We hear from Orff’s four wives and only daughter, two of his biographers, custodians of archives and teachers who use his Schulwerk.
Disappointlngly, musicians and musciologists are in short supply, though Kurt Eichhorn, who conducted many of Orff’s works, gives us a hair-raising account of playing Orff’s music under the composer’s supervision (“a sweet sadist”). And certainly the man who emerges from this mosaic is not an attractive character. Wives came and went according to whether he felt they could help him; his daughter (older than some of his wives) had a father with whom she could not communicate and concludes that “He didn’t want to have me”. The women in his life speak, without bitterness, of a man who was more at home in the “dark world” of Greek tragedy than in Catholic Bavaria; who was haunted by guilt, dreamed of witches and would probably have gone mad if it weren't for his music.
But the most depressing testimony comes from the wife of Kurt Huber, founder of the White Rose resistance group and a friend of Orff’s. Huber’s wife describes his utterly self-centred response to Huber’s arrest (“I’m ruined!”!). After the war, Orff survived the de-nazification process by convincing the American interrogator that he had co-founded the White Rose, which was of course a lie.
Meaning and music
Orff may have despised the Nazis for their lack of aesthetic sensibility (!), as his biographer puts it, but he kept his opinions to himself and prospered under the Third Reich. He was no ideologue, merely an opportunist, biding his time until the death of Hans Pfitzner and Richard Strauss would make him the first composer of the Third Reich. Orff hoped, in vain as it turned out, that the Hitler Youth movement would adopt his Schulwerk and he accepted a commission to write music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream to replace that of the banned Mendelssohn--a compromised political record, in short.
If the man himself comes across as opaque, his work and its afterlife provide a fascinating study in the role and meaning of music. Carmina Burana was a great success with the Nazis, but is it Nazi music? “O, Fortuna!” certainly generates an atmosphere of mass excitement, but so, too, does Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”.
Palmer’s matching of sound to images opens up questions without resorting to cheap insinuations. Take the surprising match of Monteverdi’s Orfeo with Nazi propaganda images. In his early life in Munich Orff discovered Monteverdi, the founder of opera. As a biographer points out, Orff was always interested in origins (Monteverdi, Greek tragedy, children’s play, the physical roots of music). But Orff, though he didn’t know it, was himself living through a momentous origin, for Munich in the twenties was the cradle of Nazism. When Palmer puts these two origins together, we are left wondering whether the grave declamation of Monteverdi’s Orpheus is conjuring up the forces of the underworld or confronting them? Image and music go well together but, as so often, it is difficult to say what one implies about the other. In another passage, a Nazi parade follows on from a scene of puppets dancing to the naively joyous Gassenhauer from Schulwerk (best known from Terence Malick's Badlands). The music seems both to support and to mock the Nazi pomp and to mutate from naive joy to mechanistic childishness according to how you associate the images.
Sound and image work together in almost all of Orff’s work, or should do. Carmina Burana itself is supposed to be accompanied by “magic pictures”, though it is usually performed as a concert piece. Orff was fascinated by puppets and magic lantern shows throughout his life, and his daughter’s description of family theatricals is the nearest she comes to describing domestic happiness. Palmer’s extracts from Orff’s opera Der Mond, based on a story by the Brothers Grimm, present us with an archetypal fable to which the eerie puppetry makes an essential contribution.
Sound and movement
Music, for Orff, was never pure sound. Central to his musical philosophy is the idea that movement produces sound and sound invites movement. This comes to life most vividly in the clapping music from Schulwerk, where clapping hands appear on a puppet stage, both producing the music and moving to it. In Palmer's film we see children from different parts of the world singing and dancing together as they make music with a battery of percussion instruments, some created especially for his Schulwerk. It is an irony that the man who could not communicate with his daughter founded a method of music education that puts a premium on communication. As a Schulwerk teacher laments, “We don’t listen to each other. We don’t listen to ourselves. We don’t listen”.
Listening to ourselves Is the beginning of music according to Orff, and Schulwerk starts from the principle that there is music with which all children are familiar: the heartbeat and other bodily rhythms, the sound of their names. (Perhaps Orff would not have considered it such a put-down that his music sounds like “the kind of music a gland would write if a gland could write music”!)
Schulwerk has proved particularly effective in helping children with cerebral palsy to coordinate their movements, communicate and express themselves. Orff pointed out that Apollo, the god of music, was also the god of healing, a connection that must have been important to Orff the man as well as the educator. It is a further irony that the composer who reportedly married his wives only to help him with his demons is now helping children around the world cope with their suffering (the Schulwerk teacher in South Africa paints a harrowing picture). It is ironic too that this dyed- in- the- wool Bavarian associated with a racist ideology has had his method adopted in China, Japan, Africa and Peru: having absorbed influences from musical traditions all over the world, Schulwerk is easily exportable.
Sound and image
Some of Orff’s work is distinctly unsuitable for children, especially the compositions that set Latin texts. His daughter says of Carmina Burana that it was daring of Orff to set texts to Latin. After all, “Who understands that stuff?” Perhaps the fact that the texts are in a dead language was just as well in the case of Catulli Carmina, where Palmer’s subtitles at one point read “Beware, I’m going to enter you-- with lust”. There can’t be many other choral works where the choir simply repeats “Penis, penis penis” (in Latin, of course).
Palmer accompanies some of the erotic passages with images of naked blondes in languid soft-core action, perhaps the only fusion of sound and image that misfires; Orff’s is not that kind of eroticism. The sight of the male and female choirs articulating their urges so blatantly in each other’s presence provides the best dramatic realisation of Orff’s urgent, insistent rhythms. Palmer’s filming of the exuberant performances by the Bavarian Radio Symphony and Choir under Donald Runnicles does the job much better than the sanitised woman- on- woman fantasies.
“O, Fortuna” leaves one with a broad spectrum of images connecting physicality and music, from the children with cerebral palsy struggling with their instruments to the gyrating blondes and the Nazi parades. This conglomeration of images is perhaps the most adequate way to make sense of Orff’s puzzling oeuvre, which should not be reduced to his signature tune.
