CARL ORFF, CARMINA
BURANA AND TONY PALMER’S FILM (WRITTEN 2008)
Jessica Duchen
Every day for the last
30 years, a performance of Carl Orff’s Carmina
Burana has taken place somewhere in the world. Few pieces of classical
music have achieved such ubiquitous recognition. Its chorus ‘O Fortuna’ has
been used to advertise beer, aftershave and horror movies; performers worldwide
fall over themselves to tackle the bawdy Latin texts and the panoply of accompanying
percussion. In January the work is coming to London’s O2 Arena in a spectacular staging by
Franz Abraham, involving 250 performers, naked dancers, fireworks, bungee
jumping and more.
The first classical presentation
at the O2 Arena, it’s also the first time since 1926 that such a vast a
classical music event will have been held indoors in the UK – nothing on this scale has been seen since
the demise of the Crystal
Palace’s Handel festivals
back in 1926. It is more than 125 years since Messiah was performed there to an audience of 87,000.
This production of Carmina Burana has now been touring for
13 years, but this is its first visit to Britain. Those who snort that the
18,000 audience capacity at O2 is too large for classical music would do well
to reflect that on Copacabana Beach in Brazil the production played to
some 100,000. Indications are that this is more than just an attempt to sex up
a classic. The performing ensemble of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the
Brighton Festival Chorus and Youth Choir and an outsize company of dancers,
actors and puppets will be conducted by Walter Haupt, a former student and
friend of the composer, and Abraham has said that on attending the premiere
Orff’s widow declared that this was what her late husband “had dreamed for his
masterpiece”.
The tormented history
of Orff himself has become the subject of a documentary by Tony Palmer. His
film O Fortuna, which premieres at
the Barbican in December, carries a message no less spectacular in its own way,
but far more sober: Carl Orff effectively sold his soul to Hitler’s henchmen,
and paid the price in his conscience for the rest of his life. Yet today his
educational innovations in music are helping to brighten the existences of
children across the globe.
The film contains much
that will shock fans, as well some phenomenal twists of fortune. Orff emerges
as a highly complex man who, according to the third of his four wives, Luise
Rinser, “found it impossible to love” and “despised people”, habitually using,
then discarding those close to him. He would often wake up in the night,
screaming, and would tell her: “I have seen the Devil.” She adds: “If he had
been a less great person, he would have gone mad. Nevertheless, there is
madness in his music.” Orff’s only child, Godela, gives a candid account of a
father whom she declares did not want her and had no place for her in his existence.
But the catalogue of lies, deception and heartlessness goes back to the very
beginning.
It turns out that Orff,
who was born in Bavaria
in 1895, had a Jewish grandmother – a fact that extraordinarily he managed to conceal
from the thorough research processes of the National Socialists. “Once you tell
one lie to cover up a lethal situation – one Jewish grandparent was enough to
condemn you to death – it’s a slippery slope,” comments Tony Palmer. “Ever more
must be done to maintain the deception.”
The lies went on. Orff
later claimed that the Nazis had banned Carmina
Burana. Nothing could have been further from the truth – they adored it,
and no wonder. Its simplicity, accessibility and primal force exemplified the
opposite of the atonal or serialist works that the regime deemed ‘decadent’
(‘entartete musik’). Indeed, the work – premiered for the Nazi party in 1937 –
helped to draw Orff to their attention and won him support from the Reich. Nor
was he above writing new incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream when the much-loved work by the Jewish
Mendelssohn was indeed banned.
Orff, however, was
never a card-carrying member of the Nazi party and privately despised them for
their crudity and philistinism. “He wasn’t interested in politics,” his second
wife, Gertrud, recalls in the film. She adds that the war was “not our fault”,
but that they did not protest because it “wasn’t safe”.
It is telling that one
of the works closest to Orff’s heart was a ‘Märchenopera’ (fairy-tale opera)
that he wrote in 1939: Der Mond, telling
of a world plunged into darkness when fiends steal the moon. It contains some
of his most appealing music, but proved unstageable except by a puppet theatre.
Many artists, comments the historian Michael H. Kater, felt that “the regime
had stolen the light” from them.
Still, it was not
difficult for the previously penniless and struggling Orff to tell that the
Reich had high hopes for him. By 1943 his name was on a special list of favoured
artists; he was not to be conscripted, he received a prize from the Cultural Chamber
of 2000 marks in 1942 and he was placed on an elite payroll that gave him 1000
marks per month. Germany’s
two senior composers, Richard Strauss and Hans Pfitzner were aging and would
soon die; it was clear that if Germany
were to win the war, Orff would quickly become the Reich’s leading composer.
One can argue that, like
so many living under insane and tyrannical regimes, Orff merely did what was necessary
in order to survive. And perhaps it was his good fortune that when he found
himself facing the ‘de-Nazification’ process after Germany’s defeat, his interrogator was
a musically educated admirer. This American intelligence officer, keen to help
him, asked him simply to provide something, anything, that could show he had
spoken out against Hitler.
Orff’s invented
response at this moment would never cease to haunt the composer.
Kurt Huber, professor
of philosophy at Munich
University, had provided
Orff with the medieval Latin texts that he set in Carmina Burana; the two had also worked together on Der Mond. In 1942 Huber and a core group
of students formed the White Rose Resistance Movement which distributed
pamphlets calling for active opposition to the Third Reich. Huber authored the
sixth and final leaflet. Huber’s widow, Clara, relates on camera that Orff was a
close friend and used to visit them every Sunday. Yet, she adds, he had no part
in the movement and never said a word against Hitler.
On the contrary, the
day after Huber’s arrest, when she told Orff what had happened, his response
was: “I am ruined! Ruined!” She hoped he would use his influence to intervene
on her husband’s behalf; but Orff did nothing. “He thought only of himself,” she
recalls. She never saw him again.
Put on the spot by the
de-Nazification interrogator, Orff falsely claimed that he had co-founded the
White Rose Movement with Huber. The group’s members, including Huber, had been executed
in 1943. Nobody was left alive to dispute his words and he walked out with a
clear name. He had only to answer to his own conscience.
Among Orff’s papers,
Michael Kater discovered a document in the composer’s handwriting, addressed to
the deceased Huber: a letter recalling their good times and begging forgiveness.
It appeared to be Orff’s private, desperate attempt to work through his guilt over
betraying his friend. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Orff’s later works
included settings of Greek tragedies, such as Antigonae and Oedipus, in
which guilt and the unforgiving nature of fate are recurrent themes.
Orff, though, has
experienced an astonishing posthumous redemption. In 1924-5 he co-founded the
Günther-Schule for music and dance in Munich.
There, with half an eye on the Hitler Youth, he devised a new approach to
musical education entitled Schulwerk
– literally, ‘schoolwork’. Its central concept is that every child is musical
and that each individual can become free to express him- or herself musically through
learning simple rhythms on percussion instruments, playing and singing in
groups, and building confidence through imagination and creative thinking.
“When we lose our fantasy,” said Orff, “we are lost.”
The Hitler Youth
turned up its nose at Schulwerk. But in
time, Orff’s ideas proved strikingly effective; today they are passionately
advocated by musical educationalists the world over.
Palmer has filmed Orff
Schulwerk classes in China, Taiwan,
the townships of South Africa
and, harrowingly, a music therapy group in Nottingham
for children with cerebral palsy. This sequence is agonising to watch. But when
one small boy breaks into a smile and reaches out for his drum, the entire
sorry saga of Carl Orff suddenly becomes worthwhile. Whatever his personal
failings, he devised a system that is now improving the lives of ailing children
who under the Third Reich would have been condemned to death.
Orff died in 1982 and
was buried in the monastery at Andechs on Bavaria’s ‘holy mountain’. Fortune may have
been merciless to him in his own mind, but in the musical world it has smiled lavishly
upon him, and continues to do so. “The good man,” said Orff, “is the one who
begins again, with his ideas and his life.”
