Posted on 12/21/2008 12:43:29 PM PST by billorites
The opening line of Carmina Burana “O Fortuna!” could hardly be more apt. Few composers felt themselves more at the mercy of capricious gods and twists of fate than its composer, Carl Orff. He was never a diehard Nazi; indeed, he looked with disdain on their oafish cultural values. Far from espousing the hounding of “inferior races”, he was fascinated by jazz and by what today we would call world music. Yet he rose to become one of the Third Reich’s top musicians.
According to one of his four wives, he “found it impossible to love” and “despised people”. Yet in Carmina Burana he created the world’s jolliest musical celebration of boozing, feasting and generally enjoying the sins of other people’s flesh.
He turned his back on his own teenage daughter, who adored him. “He didn’t want me in his married life,” she recalls sadly. Yet he was (and, in some quarters, still is) adulated in educational circles for his Schulwerksystem of teaching music to young children through rhythm and gesture – a system he originally intended to flog to the Hitler Youth movement. It is still used around the world, particularly (and paradoxically) to help children with cerebral palsy, who would probably not be alive if Hitler’s Germany had triumphed.
A connoisseur of Greek drama, and a perceptive scholar who edited and performed Monteverdi long before the rest of the world rediscovered the Baroque genius, he talked eloquently about the need for people to express themselves through art if they were to become “complete” human beings. Yet one of his wives says that he himself was full of “demonic forces” and would “wake up screaming at night”. He used people shamelessly. Yet, as another wife puts it, “all his life he wanted forgiveness” for the guilt that consumed him.
(Excerpt) Read more at entertainment.timesonline.co.uk ...
pingy.
That, and the ability to carry a tune, ought to qualify one to be the Offical Composer of the Nazi Party.
Still, the Carmina Burana ranks among the best live performances I’ve ever seen of any kind. The power of the chorous and drums just don’t come out in a recording.
White Rose ping, read the full article at source link.
Great musical theater.
Just shows the author is ignorant of Nazi history.
People with one Jewish grandparent were classified as 2nd degree mischlings, unless they practiced Judaism or identified as Jews.
Mischlings, especially 2nd degree, were generally left alone by the Nazis unless they managed to get on some bigwig's bad side, in which case they could be in trouble.
But that, of course, was just about equally true of 100% Aryan types.
The article is a little hysterical about the "betrayal." The composer didn't turn in a friend, he just refused to risk his own life to try to save the guy. Not admirable, but hardly traitorous.
Since the guy in question had founded the White Rose, nothing anybody else did was going to save him, anyway.
I read the article and I am not seeing much of a betrayal. Carl Orff couldn’t have saved his friend Huber who was a founding member of a resistance group. He was a dead man the minute he was arrested. He didn’t betray Huber to the Gestapo. He didn’t do anything. He may have been an unlikable man, and even a coward if you please, but that doesn’t amount to betrayal.
Orff's rhythms are uniformly foursquare, his melodies catchy, his moods ingratiating. His music provides what the Australian musicologist Margaret King recently called "an instant tape loop for the mind," something that, grasped fully and immediately, reverberates in the head the way propaganda is supposed to do. As Mr. Ross put it, even after half a century or more, Orff's music remains "as adept as ever at rousing primitive, unreflective enthusiasm."
Is that a reason to love it or to hate it? Everybody likes to indulge the herd instinct now and then, as Thomas Mann so chillingly reminded us in "Mario and the Magician." It is just because we like it that we ought to resist it. Could the Nazi Holocaust have been carried off without expertly rousing primitive, unreflective enthusiasm in millions? Was Orff's neo-paganism unrelated to the ideology that reigned in his homeland when he wrote his most famous scores?
In 1937, the year in which "Carmina Burana" enjoyed its smashing success, the National Socialists were engaged in a furious propaganda battle with the churches of Germany, countering the Christian message of compassion with neo-pagan worship of holy hatred. And what could better support the Nazi claim that the Germans, precisely in their Aryan neo-paganism, were the true heirs of Greco-Roman ("Western") culture than Orff's animalistic settings of Greek and Latin poets?
Certainly seems that the cover up was worse than any alleged "crime."
Great artists can often be despicable people. Frank Lloyd Wright is arguably the greatest artist in U.S. history. But, boy was he a jerk.
So, what are the implication of this question for our own soundtrack?
Ask me again in a few months. The herd’s still donning rose colored glasses in honor of their messiah.
OMG! He lied. I’m shocked. Shocked I tells ya.
He may or may not have been able to help his friend, Kurt Huber. He lacked the courage to even try.
He sunk lower than the gutter by stealing the glory for founding the White Rose.
I’ve seen sleezy scum like that from time to time. As recent as today, come to think of it. I’ll never understand why some people defend that behavior, and some even emulate it.
Classical Music PING
A lot of great musicians either acquiesced to the Nazis or collaborated with them.
Herbert von Karajan, Karl Böhm, Wilhelm Fürtwängler, Elisabeth Schwartzkopf, Ludwig Sutholm, Wilhelm Backhaus......even Richard Strauss.
Big deal. That doesn’t diminish their greatness one iota IMHO.
Exactly. There are actually still people who whine about Sergei Eisenstien.
Agreed. I'd always enjoyed "O Fortuna" on CD, but it wasn't until my wife and I attended a live performance that I realized the full power of this composition. It resonates with something deep in the psyche.
bump
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