Artist: Piero Gallo

Supported languages: English , Italiano

A major representative of the “Frankfurt Group”, during his activity as a musician and teacher Carl Orff sought an answer to the problems posed by the tonal division of dodecaphony, developing a musical language in which the drastic rhythm and sometimes obsessive repetitiveness of the melodic refrains seduce the listener with freshness, inventiveness, and immediate expressive strength.
Orff considered “Carmina Burana” – performed for the first time in 1937 – the point of arrival of this search and the start of his artistic production. The work is part of a musical triptych called “Trionfi”, together with “Catulli Carmina” and “Trionfo di Afrodite”: “ludi scaenici” on the subject of love, visual and sound representations in which dance, singing, and instrumental music contribute to form an organic expressive whole.
However “Carmina Burana” is often performed in the form of a concert, and has become part of the best symphonic-choral repertoire.
The work’s subtitle is “Cantiones profanae cantoribus, instrumentis atque imaginibus magicis”, and the lyrics are taken from the collection of the monastery of Benediktbeuren (hence the term “Burana”), which scholars call the Codex Latinus 4660, comprising light-hearted texts of the famous Medieval Goliards or “clerici vagantes” (wandering clerics) of the 1200s, inspired by a pagan idea of life, praising wine and love; they are written in a mixture of Low Latin with medieval German and with other vernaculars such as Provençal.
In composing his music, Orff practically did away with counterpoint interweaving, preferring to treat the choral parts in blocks, accentuating a certain archaism of inspiration that also manifests itself in the fluidity of the variations in rhythmic writing within the musical phrases.
The work was written to be performed by three soloists (baritone, soprano, and tenor), a chorus, a sizable orchestra, and a large number of percussion instruments.
As may be easily understood, the set-up of such an arrangement poses a number of problems, not least of all that of space; perhaps it was also for this reason that German musician Wilhelm Killmayer transcribed the orchestral part into an arrangement for two pianos, featured in the version presented here.
The composition consists of a prologue and three parts. The prologue features a meditation on the volubility of the goddess Fortune who, blindly distributing good and evil, influences the world’s events. The first part, and the longest, praises springtime, the celebration of life and love. The second, which has a clearly goliardic and realistic inspiration, is called “In Taberna”: it features drinkers who complain, curse, and praise the joys of meat and the wine they are drinking. The third part sings of the games of love and the feelings accompanying them, described with a finesse that recalls the manners of the wooing of troubadours: when the girl finally gives in to her lover’s wishes, a large, magnificent chorus raises a hymn of praise to Venus, the splendid goddess of love. The closing reprise of the initial theme redefines the composition with the idea of Fortune shaping and coordinating the entire work.