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Carmina Burana
Saturday, November 19, 2011 - 8:15 PM
Beauty and the Beast
An American Composer's Perspective on
Franz Schubert (1797-1828) and Carl Orff (1895-1982)
© Robert Xavier Rodríguez
Some say that Bach and Mozart were the two greatest composers who ever lived; others say Mozart and Bach. For the next two slots, some say Beethoven and Schubert; others say Schubert and Beethoven. In this august company, Franz Schubert emerges as the most modest of the greats. Shy, pudgy, with thick glasses and under five feet tall, Schubert was not a commanding figure. He did some teaching at his father's grammar school, and he received a few commissions, but there was only one public concert of his music during his lifetime. The bulk of his music-making was for his own pleasure, with private performances in the homes of an intimate circle of devoted friends and admirers.
Of the composers of the "first Viennese School" of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, the only one actually born in Vienna was Schubert. He studied with Mozart's adversary Antonio Salieri, and he idolized Beethoven. Schubert carried a torch at Beethoven's funeral, and when Schubert himself died a year later, he was buried, at his request, next to Beethoven, where he remains today. On his deathbed, Beethoven had declared, "Surely, Schubert has the divine spark."
Often called a Romantic composer, Schubert was the last of the great Classicists. His formal structures, while sometimes harmonically daring, remain squarely in the Classical sonata-allegro tradition, patterned devotedly on Mozart and Beethoven. By taking on these models, paradoxically, Schubert found his own distinctive musical personality. As the 20th-Century French writer Jean Cocteau put it, "An original artist is unable to copy; so he has only to copy in order to be original." Work after work of Schubert bears an uncanny resemblance to a specific model by Mozart or Beethoven; but in every case, the result is unmistakably pure Schubert.
While Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert worked in all of the standard genres, each composer had one area of unique mastery: for Haydn, it was the string quartet; for Mozart, it was opera; for Beethoven, it was the symphony; for Schubert, it was the song. Even in his sonatas, chamber ensembles and symphonies, Schubert was first a composer of songs. With long, lilting melodies of regular phrase lengths in a comfortable range, Schubert's instrumental music always calls out for a voice and German words. It is ironic that Schubert's contemporary, the writer Johann Goethe, did not care for Schubert's settings of his poems; Goethe found them too complicated and said that they distracted from the text
As Sir Francis Tovey observed, since Schubert only lived to be 31, all of his over 900 compositions are early works. His first masterpieces were songs set to poems of Goethe: Gretchen am Spinrade in 1814 and the famous Erlkönig the following year. The Symphony No. 5 in B-flat came in 1816, when Schubert was 19. It opens with a shaft of musical sunlight, with the simplest of chord progressions (I-vi-IV-V-I) high in the winds to create a halo around the violins as they enter with the principal theme. After the development, Schubert uses Mozart's device, from the C-Major Piano Sonata K.545, of starting the recapitulation not in the tonic key, but in the subdominant to create more contrast with the second theme when it is played in the tonic. Schubert liked this trick so well that he used it again the next year in his Quintet in A-Major ("The Trout"). The second movement, Andante con moto, is the longest: rich in subtle modulations that move by thirds, rather than by fifths, and full of the noble solemnity of Sarastro's music in Mozart's Magic Flute, K.620. The intense Menuet that follows has a striking similarity to the Minuet of Mozart's Symphony No.40 in G-minor, K. 550, particularly when performed at a fast tempo. The finale is a romp in the spirit of Beethoven's jovial Symphony No. 4, also in B-flat, written ten years earlier.
Schubert's first seven symphonies have been overshadowed by his later, tragic B-Minor Symphony No. 8 ("Unfinished") and the C-Major Symphony, No. 9 ("Great"). (Like Beethoven, Schubert died before completing a Tenth Symphony.) The Fifth Symphony, nevertheless, stands apart from Schubert's earlier works to mark the composer's coming of age as a mature master worthy to take up the mantle of Mozart and Beethoven. Even the cynical American writer H.L. Mencken (who said, "97% of everything is crap") held Schubert in special reverence: "[Schubert] stands above all of them as a contriver of sheer beauty, as a maker of music in the purest sense…one of the great glories of the human race."
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Carl Orff was born in Munich nearly 100 years after Schubert. He was a conductor and an editor of early music, including Monteverdi, but his greatest achievement was the development of Orff Schulwerke, an influential series of educational materials for schoolchildren, in which (tonal) music is linked to spoken language and physical movement to encourage creativity. As a composer, Orff is remembered chiefly for his choral ballet Carmina Burana, based on 13th-century Latin texts found at the Bavarian Benedictine Abby in Beuren ("boy-ren").
The title Carmina Burana has an exotic, pagan ring that belies its simple meaning: "Songs of Beuren." The bawdy texts, by renegade clerical students called Goliards, constitute an important body of rhythmic, secular Latin poetry. The subject matter is gleefully irreverent: celebrating riotous living, with philosophical meditations on the fickleness of fortune and wealth, the ephemeral nature of life, the joys and beauties of springtime and the pleasures and perils of drinking, gluttony, gambling and, above all, lust. There is an especially witty lament by a swan as he is roasting on a spit.
The Beuren manuscript contains some of the original medieval music for the songs, but Orff did not use it. Instead, Orff patterned his score on two Stravinsky masterpieces: the opera/oratorio Oedipus Rex, based on Sophocles, and the choral ballet Les Noces (The Wedding), based on Russian folk texts. Like Oedipus Rex, Carmina Burana is in Latin, scored for soloists, chorus and orchestra; like Les Noces, it combines dance and colorful percussion with mesmerizing ostinatos and dramatic, primal vocal outbursts. Unlike Stravinsky, however, whose music abounds in layers of contrapuntal motivic development and intricate patterns of shifting sonorities, textures and rhythms, Orff dials down the complexities in favor of simple modal fragments repeated with no variation, accompanied by triads hammering out a single rhythm. The result is music of a barbaric, minimalist power that audiences have found irresistible.
Alex Ross has commented upon Carmina Burana's capacity to rouse "primitive, unreflective enthusiasm." The work's premiere, in 1937 under Nazi auspices, was hailed for its glorification of an imaginary past of medieval Germanic splendor. The music embodied the formula of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's "Minister of National Enlightenment," for effective propaganda: "Confine yourself to a few points and repeat them over and over." Hitler had banned performances of Stravinsky and Germany's modernist masters such as Schönberg, Berg, Webern, Hindemith and Weill as Entartete Musik (or Degenerate Music), so the Nazis relished Orff's accessible, user-friendly music for the people as a kind of sonic Volkswagen ("car for the people"), which went on sale the following year.
Orff was not a Nazi, but was cozy with them, even offering to compose music for Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream to replace the score by the Jewish Mendelssohn. Orff also refused to use his influence to save the life of his friend Karl Huber, founder of "The White Rose" resistance movement. After WWII, however, when the Allies questioned prominent Germans to determine their Nazi status, Orff lied and claimed that he and Huber had been co-founders of the resistance.
Today, removed from any political context, Carmina Burana retains its force. After Handel's Messiah and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, it is the most often-performed work for chorus and orchestra. It is also heard in video games, figure skating routines, rock concerts, commercials for beer, Gatorade, chocolate and juvenile action heroes and in countless movies. Critics have taken Orff to task for his Nazi associations and his overt populism, but, if he were alive today, with his massive royalties, he would probably echo Liberace's famous reply to his detractors, "I cry all the way to the bank!"
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Robert Xavier Rodríguez has served as Composer-in-Residence for the Dallas Symphony and the San Antonio Symphony. He holds the Endowed Chair of University Professor of Music and is Director of the Musica Nova ensemble at the University of Texas at Dallas.
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