For my first entry I’d like to share with you all this recording of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana:

Lyrics with English translations are available at this companion site to an introductory Latin textbook by Gavin Betts.¹ I recommend following along as you listen.

Carmina Burana is a cantata that Orff, a German composer, premiered in Frankfurt in 1937. The text is taken from a collection of poems from the Middle Ages found in a Bavarian monastery in 1803. (Orff chose 24 of the 228 poems in the larger Carmina Burana collection.) The piece is arranged for choir, children’s choir, woodwinds, strings, piano, brass, and lots and lots of percussion.

The most obvious feature of this piece is its sheer grandiosity. He relies heavily on the percussion section, and every poem, even the silly and trite ones, is belted out with passion. (Maybe he intended it as bathos or parody; I really don’t know, but it doesn’t make the tunes any less catchy or the simple expressions of love and anguish any less endearing.) And he lays his cards on the table at the very beginning with “O Fortuna” as a signal of what you ought to expect.

But what I find most compelling about the work is the Latin and Middle High German text—particularly, that it’s entirely secular. The poets were wandering scholars of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when it was common for students to go wandering from university town to university town, using Latin as their common language, and establishing their own irreverent culture. Betts put it this way:

The Carmina Burana show attitudes not usually associated with the Middle Ages; we see a quite amoral attitude to sex, a fresh appreciation of nature, and a disrespect of the established church which even today’s society would find hard to tolerate. The Wandering Scholars were very much concerned with enjoying themselves, they were frank and uninhibited, and were not afraid of attacking or ridiculing people and institutions they did not like. Their poetry was written for the immediate present, to express an emotion or experience, to complain of some current abuse, but chiefly, one may conjecture, to entertain their fellows as they caroused.²

So in this cantata we have a peek into the minds of the nonreligious intelligentsia of the Middle Ages; people who, were they alive today, would probably be called free thinkers or secular humanists. And would probably have blogs.

Besides several love poems and poems celebrating the beauty of spring, Carmina Burana contains, toward the middle, a section called “In Taberna” (”In the Tavern”), and it’s this section that, before it goes off into a celebration of carousing and making fun of an abbot, contains my absolute favorite of the Carmina, “Olim lacus couleram” (”Once I dwelt on lakes”)³;

Olim lacus colueram,
olim pulcher exstiteram,
dum cygnus ego fueram.
Miser, miser!
modo niger
et ustus fortiter!

Girat, regirat garcifer;
me rogus urit fortiter;
propinat me nunc dapifer.
Miser, miser!
modo niger
et ustus fortiter!

Nunc in scutella iaceo,
et volitare nequeo;
dentes frendentes video.
Miser, miser!
modo niger
et ustus fortiter!

Eng.:
Once I had dwelt on lakes,
once I had been beautiful, when I was a swan.
Poor wretch! Now black
and well roasted!

The cook turns me back and forth;
I am roasted to a turn on my pyre;
now the waiter serves me.
Poor wretch!
Now black
and well roasted!

Now I lie on the dish,
and I cannot fly;
I see the gnashing teeth.
Poor wretch!
Now black
and well roasted!³

The tenor soloist sings with pathos in his role in the swan, and it’s entirely, entirely appropriate. It’s a moment when some humane bastard was standing there, watching the hunk of flesh turning on a spit, and he or she was able to get the general gist of what was going on, which was that something beautiful had been killed. And not just killed! Subjected to ignominy as well: gutted, plucked, blackened, roasted—and carried about by the uncaring cook and waiter.

This performance is by The University of California Davis University Chorus and Alumni Chorus, the UC Davis Symphony Orchestra, and the Pacific Boychoir Academy, with Jeffrey Thomas conducting.

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¹ Gavin Betts’s companion site to his book Teach Yourself Latin (McGraw-Hill, 2003). (http://www.tylatin.org).

² Excerpted from http://www.tylatin.org/extras/index.html.

³ Translation by Betts at http://www.tylatin.org/extras/cb12.html.

Tags: Music Post-off