All my life I’ve managed to avoid singing Carmina Burana, but it was bound to catch up with me sooner or later, and that moment has now arrived. This is one of those pieces that polarises singers and audiences. What exactly is my problem with it?
Orff’s role in the Third Reich is never going to be easy to gloss over. If I read the accounts of his life correctly, he was unprincipled, selfish and dishonest. But if we only performed music by the morally noble, the repertoire would be a lot smaller. And while I’d like to think that if history repeated itself, and ‘degenerate’ scores were destroyed, they would have to come and tear the last copy of the Altenberglieder or Lyric Suite out of my hands, I don’t know that I wouldn’t have behaved the same way as Orff in his situation.
My real problem is more with the percussive and apparently unmelodic vocal lines and lack of thematic development. However, I am willing just this once to be open to persuasion that there are subtleties in the piece that I’ve missed. I’m not, after all, rehearsing just this piece for weeks on end; it comes as part of a package. And the ticket sales show that there are plenty of people out there who want to hear it. There’s something to be learned from actors, who are always enthusing about their latest project no matter whether it happens to be to their taste or not.
And there are some things to be said for Carmina Burana:
- The rigid rhythms are an antidote to the very flexible tempi in The Kingdom
- It’s one of the rare works with a choral top C for the sopranos – and one of the rarer ones that gives it to the whole section, not just the 1sts
- The lyrics make it clear (as I suppose does the continued existence of the human race) that sex did not disappear after ancient times, only to re-emerge in 1963
- It is apparently good background music for wine tastings