Carl Orff
Orff was born in Munich on July 10, 1895. His family was Bavarian and active in the German military. Orff started studying the piano at age five and also took organ and cello lessons.
By the time he was a teenager, Orff was writing songs, although he had not studied harmony or composition. His mother helped him set down his first works in musical notation. Orff wrote his own texts and he learned the art of composing, without a teacher, by studying classical masterworks on his own.
In 1911-12, Orff wrote a large work for baritone voice, three choruses and orchestra, Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) op. 14, based on a passage from Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical novel of the same title. The following year, he composed an opera, Gisei, das Opfer (Gisei, the Sacrifice). Influenced by the French Impressionist composer Claude Debussy, and began to use colorful, unusual combinations of instruments in his orchestration.
Orff studied at the Munich Academy of Music until 1914. He then served in the military in World War I, during which he was severely injured and nearly killed. Afterwards, he held various positions at opera houses in Mannheim and Darmstadt, later returning to Munich to pursue his music studies.
In the mid-1920s Orff began to formulate a concept he called elementare Musik, or elemental music, which was based on the unity of the arts symbolized by the ancient Greek Muses and involved tone, dance, poetry, image, design, and theatrical gesture. Like many other composers of the time he was influenced by the Russian-French emigré Igor Stravinsky. Orff's German version of Orpheus was staged in 1925 in Mannheim, Germany, under Orff's direction, using some of the instruments that had been used in the original 1607 performance. The opera of Monteverdi's era was almost unknown in the 1920s, however, and Orff's production met with reactions ranging from incomprehension to ridicule.
From 1925 until the end of his life, Orff was the head of a department and co-founder of the Guenther School for gymnastics, music, and dance in Munich, where he worked with musical beginners. This is where he developed his theories in music education, having constant contact with children. In 1930, Orff published a manual titled Schulwerk, where he shares his method of conducting. Prior to writing Carmina Burana, Orff edited 17th century operas. He had previously founded a school for gymnastics with Dorothee Günther in 1924.
Carmina Burana
Based on the Carmina Burana, a collection of Latin and German Goliard poems discovered in 1803 in the library of the Benedictine monastery of Benediktbeuern, near Munich. Written by monks and minstrels, the collection appealed to Orff because of the variety of its humorous, sad, and suggestive verses. He selected about twenty featuring the wheel of fortune and arranged them into bawdy songs for soloists and chorus, accompanied by instruments and magic images.
With the success of Carmina Burana, Orff disowned all of his previous works except for Catulli Carmina and the Entrata, which were rewritten until acceptable by Orff. Carmina Burana is probably the most famous piece of music composed and premiered in Nazi Germany. Carmina Burana was in fact so popular that Orff received a commission in Frankfurt to compose incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream, which was supposed to replace the banned music by Mendelssohn. After the war, he claimed not to be satisfied with the music and reworked it into the final version that was first performed in 1964.
The Nazi Era
Orff's relationship to German fascism and the Nazi Party has been a matter of considerable debate and analysis. His Carmina Burana was hugely popular in Nazi Germany after its premiere in Frankfurt in 1937, receiving numerous performances. But the composition with its unfamiliar rhythms was also denounced with racist taunts. He was one of the few German composers under the Nazi regime who responded to the official call to write new incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream after the music of Felix Mendelssohn had been banned — others refused to cooperate in this. Defenders of Orff note that he had already composed music for this play as early as 1917 and 1927, long before this was a favour for the Nazi government. Critics, however, note that writing music for the play in those years, when the Nazis were not in power, is not the same as writing such music in response to a request from the Nazi party, following the party's racist attacks on Mendelssohn because he was a Jew.
Carmina Burana made Orff's name in Nazi cultural circles. After some initial official discomfort about the work's frank sexual innuendos, Orff's cantata was elevated to the status of a signature piece in Nazi circles, where it was treated as an emblem of Third Reich "youth culture". The Nazi newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, once pointed to Orff's cantata as "the kind of clear, stormy, and yet always disciplined music that our time requires."
Kurt Huber was a close friend of Orff's and an academic who had helped him with librettos. During the war Huber founded the Munich unit of Die Weisse Rose (The White Rose), the German resistance movement. In February 1943 he and other Resistance members were arrested by the Gestapo, tortured and publicly hanged. Orff happened to call at Huber’s house the day after his arrest. Huber’s wife begged Orff to use his influence to help her husband. But Orff’s only thought was for his own position. If his friendship with Huber came out, he told her, he would be "ruined." Huber’s wife never saw Orff again.
Post War
Two years later, after Germany’s surrender, Orff himself was interrogated – by an American intelligence officer who had to establish whether Orff could be "denazi-fied." That would allow Orff (among other things) to collect the massive royalties from Carmina Burana. The American asked Orff if he could think of a single thing he had done to stand up to Hitler, or to distance himself from the policies of the Third Reich? Orff had done nothing of that kind. So he made up a brazen lie. Knowing that anyone who might contradict him was likely to be dead, he told the intelligence officer that he had co-founded Die Weisse Rose with his friend, Kurt Huber. He was believed – or at least, not sufficiently disbelieved to have his denazification delayed.
Most of Orff's later works - Antigonae (1949), Oedipus der Tyrann (Oedipus the King, 1958), Prometheus desmotes (1967), and De temporum fine comoedia (A Play for the End of Time, 1971) - were based on texts or topics from antiquity. They extend the language of Carmina Burana in interesting ways, but they are expensive to stage and are not operas in the conventional sense. They are occasionally performed, most often in Germany.
Orff was married four times: Alice Solscher (m. 1920, div. 1925), Alice Willert (m. 1939, div. 1953), Luise Rinser (m. 1954, div. 1959) and Liselotte Schmitz (m. 1960). His only child Godela, from his first marriage, was born in 1921.
Orff died in 1982 at the age of 86 and was buried in the Baroque church of the beer-brewing Benedictine priory of Andechs, south of Munich. His tombstone bears his name, his dates of birth and death, and the Latin inscription "Summus Finis" (the ultimate goal).
You can find a English translation here.
While searching for images of Orff, I came across a picture from the CourierTimes. Just so there's no confusion, this is not Carl Orff.
Carmina Burana
Eugen Jocham conducting the Deutschen Opernhauses Orchester and Deutschen Opernhauses Orchester
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