Opera

Carmina Burana

31 October · 2, 3 November 2024

The opera

Total 70 min. approx.

Comunale Nouveau

Information: The full title is Carmina burana: Cantiones profanae cantoribus et choris cantandae, comitantibus instrumentis atque imaginibus magicis.
When the Middle Ages come into fashion, the Middle Ages are invented. It happens in Romanticism; it happens in the neo-Gothic architecture that fills cities — Bologna among them — with battlements and mullioned windows; it happens in music, when old or old-sounding modes and styles are dusted off. Carl Orff invents it, with no philological pretensions, when between 1934 and 1936 he composes a cantata on verses by the clerici vagantes, the wandering students of the eleventh and twelfth centuries collected in the Codex Buranus. He makes the profane hymn to Fortune, empress of the world, the frame for five sequences — student, satirical and erotic — in Latin, Old French and Middle High German. So, despite the nationalist flavour of this literary appeal to origins, the regime’s critics did not welcome the exuberance of the themes and of the musical treatment. Those are the very things that would secure the fame of Orff’s work, inspired by the sharp spirit of Europe’s first university students and by now part of the common imagination, from cinema to pop.

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