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Carl Orff

Carl Orff (July 10, 1895, Munich - March 29, 1982 Munich) was a German composer.

Orff is most known for Carmina Burana (1937), a "scenic cantata". It is the first of a trilogy that also included Catulli Carmina and Trionfo di Afrodite, which reflected his interest in medieval German poetry. Together the trilogy is called as Trionfi meaning triumph. It is described as the celebration of the triumph of the human spirit through sexual and wholistic balance. The work was based on 13th-century erotic verse found in Bavaria. While "modern" in some of his compositional techniques, Orff in the trilogy is able to capture the spirit of the medieval period with infectious rhythms and easy tonalities. The medieval poems written in an early form of German and in Latin were often racy, but without descending into smut for smut's sake. As a historical aside, Carmina Burana is probably the most famous piece of music composed and premiered in Nazi Germany.

While Orff's association, or lack thereof, with the Nazi party has never been conclusively established, Carmina Burana was hugely popular in Nazi Germany after its premiere and received numerous performances (although one Nazi critic reviewed it savagely as "degenerate" (entartete). It was so popular that Orff received a commission in Vienna to compose music for Midsummer Night's Dream to replace the banned music by Mendelssohn. Orff began working on the new incidental music, however he did not complete it until 1964.

Orff was a personal friend of Karl Huber, one of the founders of the resistance movement Die Weiße Rose (the White Rose), who was executed by the Gestapo in 1943. After the war Orff claimed that he was one of the members of the group, and himself involved in the resistance, but unfortunately there was no evidence for this other than his own word, and other sources dispute his claim (for example [1]).

In pedagogical circles he is probably best remembered for his Schulwerk (1930-35), translated into English as his "Music for Children." Its simple musical instrumentation allowed even untutored child musicians to perform the piece with relative ease. Much of his life Orff worked with children, using music as an educational tool. Both melody and rhythm are often determined by the words, in either the German or English production. There is a feeling of enthusiasm that echo the joy the performers obviously feel in creating such beautiful music. These ideas were further developed together with Gunild Keetman into a very innovative approach of music education for children known as the Orff Schulwerk. The term 'schulwerk' is the German term for schooling or school work, in this regard, in the area of music.

Orff was reluctant to call any of his works just operas. For example, he called Der Mond ("The Moon") (1939) a "Märchenoper": Fairytale Opera. Die Kluge ("The Wise Woman") (1943) would fall into the same category. In both there is that same medieval or timeless sound without actually copying the musical idioms of the period. The melodies, rhythms and, with them, the text are so memorable that they can be recalled years after one hearing, which is proof of a rare and flawless union of words and music.

Of his Antigone (1949) Orff said specifically, that it was not an opera, but a Vertonung, a "musical setting" of the ancient tragedy. The text is an excellent German translation, executed by Friedrich Hölderlin, of Sophocles' play of that name. The orchestration relies heavily on percussion section, and otherwise is fairly simple. Some have called the style minimalist, which it may be in terms of melodic line, but it matches the emotional content of the original play with ease. The story of Antigone has a haunting similarity to the story of Sophie Scholl, the hero of the White Rose, and Orff may have been memorializing her in his opera.

His last work, De Temporum Fine Comoedia ("A Play of the End of Time") had its premiere at the Salzburg music festival on August 20, 1973, by Herbert von Karajan and the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. In this highly personal work Orff presented a mystery play in which he summarized his view of the end of time, sung in Greek, German, and Latin.

Orff is buried in the Baroque church of the beer-brewing Catholic monastery of Andechs, south of Munich.