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In the quest for primeval
There were at least two ways how a son of Bavarian
officer Carl Orff (born 189 5) became and remained famous in the world
of music and theatre, which he personally never separated: as a music-dance
pedagogue who raised generations of dancers using his own and new
methods, and, of course, as a composer of famous Carmina Burana, one of
his first eminent works. Being educated at the Academy of Music in
Munich, Orff starts off as a correpetitor and conductor in the same town,
later in Mannheim and Darmstadt, to finally lead the dancing school
Günther in Munich, which he co-founded, as a pedagogue in the age of
thirty. Starting from the rhythm as basic element connected to dance
motions, as a media of children music education he introduces special
instruments consisting mainly of percussions, on which he will insist in
his later work as well. Fascinated by the quest for primeval, elementary,
original, Orff consciously rejects numerous recipes of European music
praxis. Elements of elaborated polyphony, symphonic elaboration and rich
modulation are very rare in his work. As a representative of the so-called
neoprimitivism, he persists on simplicity of melodics, diatonicism,
perseverance of rhythmics, sequence and repetition of individual
melodical fragments (rather than their elaboration), and on specific
tone colour and orchestra structure. All of these elements are vividly
present already in Carmina burana (1937), although some of them are to
be further developed by Orff. In Antigona, a work composed some ten
years after Carmina Burana, Orff abandons the refinement and saturation
of romantic sound in such a measure that his orchestra enter 4 pianos on
which is occasionally played by
clappers and plectrums, 6 contrabasses, 3 harps, 6 trumpets, 4 flutes, 6
oboes and extraordinary rich groups of percussion that need to be played
by at least 15 musicians. Besides that, there were groups of xylophones,
gongs, bells, triangles, tympanums, castanets, stone plates etc.
Astonished by unusually unbound mediaeval songs discovered at the
beginning of the 19th century in a Benedictine monastery in Styria, it
took Orff only several weeks to compose Carmina burana, while he needed
a year to complete the instrumentation.
Carl Orff German composer (10. 7.189 5, Munich, -29 . 3.1982
Munich). Educated in Munich where he became conductor of Chamber Theatre.
After shorter engagement in Mannheim and Darmstadt, in 192 0 he is again
in Munich, where he together with Dorothee Gunther founded a school for
gymnastics, dance and music in 192 4. Besides, he was a conductor of
Munich Bach Orchestra and from 1950-196 0 professor at Higher Music
School; 196 1 he overtakes administration in newly found Mozarteum in
Sazburg. For decades he has been among the most important ones in Europe
at the field of musical theatre. Combining the word, music and motion in
his works, Orff has revived antic theatre and opposed the late romantic
music drama. Orff’s style is based upon rhythm arising from body motions,
diatonicism, and refined, occasionally primitive orchestral sound
achieved by usage of numerous percussions. For his art the word, in its
original form, is very important, so he uses texts in numerous languages
and dialects, from ancient Greek and classical Latin over mediaeval
Latin, old French and Middle High German to Bavarian. Orff’s music
theatre is always at the same time direct and stylised, realistic and
symbolic; it is a theatre of artistic reality and human fantasy.
Inspired by folk tales and ballads, but also sources from antique, Orff
has created a sequence of highly eminent musical-scenic works that
ensured him a permanent place in the history of music of the 20th
century.
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