Monday, Dec. 06, 1954
Puffed-Rice Cantata
In Manhattan's Carnegie Hall last week, the stage was set for one of the year's most interesting musical evenings. The program booklets pictured the famous, flaxen froth of hair and the powerful profile of Conductor Leopold Stokowski. The text of the work to be performed was taken from low and lofty verses, written by 13th century wandering scholars, vagabond poets and runaway monks, collected under the title, Carmina Burana.* The music was by Carl Orff, considered by Germans to be their most important living composer. U.S. conductors also consider him important: they scheduled no less than 15 Carminas this season.
As the concert began, the reasons for the success of the work practically hammered at the listeners' ears: this kind of music sounded big and flashy without forcing the audience out of its after-dinner stupor. The chorus sang the simplest kind of melody, from mild love lyrics and nursery-rhyme interludes to rowdy drinking songs and Teutonic gallops, set against passages of syncopated whispering and of sudden, surprising fortissimos. The orchestra sometimes provided halfhearted modernities, medieval primitivisms. Its percussion section was usually busy as a steam calliope on circus day. Most of the lyrics were in vulgarized but vital Latin, with simple driving rhythms. Sample:
Primo pro nummata vini, ex hac bibunt libertini; semel bibunt pro captivis, post hec bibunt ter pro vivis, quater pro Christianis cunctis, quinquies pro fidelibus defunctis, sexies pro sororibus vanis, septies pro militibus silvanis . . ./-
For a while, all of this was fun to hear. Conductor Stokowski, his genius undimmed at 72, had trained the Boston University Chorus and Orchestra into a unit of high professional caliber. But soon it appeared that Composer Orff was blowing up his perfectly acceptable tunes to puffed-rice dimensions, repeating too often, underlining points that were clear from the start. Before he reached the three-quarter mark of his work, it was clear that he was not headed anywhere.
Completed in 1936, Carmina Bur ana is Carl Orff's first major work (he destroyed all his previous manuscripts), the piece he calls his "snowplow" because it clears a path with listeners for acceptance of his others, e.g., musical plays based on Grimm fairy tales, poems by Catullus, Greek tragedy. He called it a "dramatic cantata," and meant it to be performed as a theater piece. At 59, still living near his native Munich, Orff no longer writes for the concert hall. Says he: "Melody and speech belong together. I reject the idea of a pure music."
*Literally, "Songs of Beuren," so named for the old Bavarian monastery of Benedictbeuren, where the poems were found in 1803.
/- "First the dice are thrown for wine which the libertines drink. Then they toast the prisoners twice; then they toast the living thrice. Four times wine is drunk for Christians, five times for the faithful departed, six times for the boastful sisters, seven times for the forest soldiers .
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