Carmina Burana is full of sex
Did you know that Carl Orff's Carmina Burana is full of sex? I didn't until reading this item in the Austin Chronicle about a Carmina Burana singalong being performed at a local Baptist ministry.
But we've got to wonder if the Riverbend [Church] folks are also deserving of kudos for pushing the boundaries of churchly tolerance of artistic espression ... or are they, perhaps, unaware that much of the story of Carl Orff's masterpiece has to do - obscured by Latin or not - with boozing and betting and the vigorous debauching of maidens? That it's a multipartite pagan screed in favor of fleshly vice over spiritual virtue? That the activities it so lustily promotes are probably not What Jesus Would Do unless He was already bombed out of His mind on one too many Gethsemane Coolers?
David Paul Jobling gets in the spirit with an exuberant review of a performance by the Sydney Symphony.
With lyrics like I bear my back under your assault and Behold, welcome and longed-for spring brings delight back, the meadows glow with rich flowers, the sun makes all things bright.(and) Hawker, give me rouge to make my cheeks red, so that I can invite the young men to welcome love.(and) Complying soothes me, refusing casts me down... Ah yes, fornication and a whole lot of drinking! The poor, the wealthy, the boys the girls... it's Mardi Gras!
This is the hot, lascivious, gut stirring stuff that wet dreams are made of. If you can get to see this monumental piece, go for it. No need to drop an ekky before you go, the wonderful Simon Kenway and his glorious wild things will take you there, raw unadulterated, seethingly sweet, unsafe sizzling, Orff your face sex.
The program notes for a performance in Pennsylvania earlier this year provides some good background.
The poems on which this secular cantata is based were written by thirteenth-century goliards (goliards were undisciplined posse of students and vagrant clerics whose lustiness and lack of respect for authority set their music apart from the troubadours who entertained the upper classes with songs of courtly love, and knightly adventure). A large portion of goliard song manuscripts was discovered in 1803 at the Benedictine monastery of Beuren in Bavaria (near Munich). In 1847, Johann Andreas Schmeller edited and published a number of these under the title Carmina Burana (Songs of Beuren). Orff chose to select only the poetry text from this book to set to the cantata and set them to original music. The poems mingle Christian piety and pagan hedonism in a spirit of simplicity and unselfconscious directness intrinsic in medieval thought of morality. Celebration of uninhibited pleasures of life, love, sex and bawdiness are prevalent.
These sound like my kind of monks. Another good overview of the cantata's racy content is available at 'Carmina Burana' - Drink, Sex and Mediaeval Monks.
