The big "classical" winner at the recent Grammy Awards was On the Transmigration of Souls, John Adams's pious tribute to the victims of Sept. 11, 2001 (the Nonesuch recording took three trophies). But the hottest classical piece in Canada this season was written by a man who accepted a state prize from Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels.
The piece is Carmina Burana, a scenic cantata written by Carl Orff in 1937, and popular around the world ever since. It's the 20th century's greatest classical hit, and has been plundered accordingly, for the soundtracks of at least a dozen films and in commercials for running shoes, men's cologne and potato chips.
Right now we're in the midst of a rush hour of Canadian performances of the whole cantata, with or without dancers and fireworks. Orchestras in Montreal, Vancouver and Edmonton have the piece on their spring programs, and a huge staged production from Munich (think of Cirque de Soleil having a run at Gregorian chant) is preparing to land at Toronto's Air Canada Centre and Montreal's Bell Centre in the coming days. John Alleyne set a new dance version on Ballet B.C. last spring, and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet performed Mauricio Wainrot's ballet at the National Arts Centre in January.
Even the record stores have some new Carmina (Latin for "songs"): a recent live recording on EMI Classics by Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic; and a DVD version of a 1989 performance by Seiji Ozawa, also with the Berlin Phil (on Philips). You can probably also still find last year's CD reissue of the rock version done in 1983 by the Doors' Ray Manzarek with Philip Glass.
Carmina Burana owes its popularity to its propulsive rhythms, memorable chant-like tunes and robust celebration of life as lived by itinerant student-poets in 13th-century Germany. Those same qualities appealed to the Nazis, who after some hesitation over Orff's use of Latin lyrics, pronounced his work a tremendous advertisement for the values of the regime.
A Nazi party paper described the piece, as well as Orff's subsequent oeuvres, as "the kind of clear, stormy, and yet always disciplined music that our time requires." Orff also served the requirements of the time by producing new incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream to replace that of Felix Mendelssohn, as part of a Nazi plan to expunge traces of Jewish involvement in Germanic artistic history.
Orff became an important symbol for the Nazis, as living proof that the Reich was not entirely opposed to modern music -- or conversely, that modern music was not entirely "decadent." He was given a monthly salary by the music-loving Nazi governor of Vienna, offered projects by Goebbels's film bureau, and received a full exemption from military service -- one of only 12 given to composers during the Third Reich.
After the war, Orff, like many other German artists, was questioned by the Allied forces about his relations with the Nazis (and his American interrogator turned out to be one of his former students). Orff insinuated that his working relationship with a musician involved with the White Rose resistance movement included support for the group's political aims. He also said that he had "fled into the mountains" after the White Rose was wiped out by the SS, as if he, too, had been in danger. That was enough for the composer to avoid the performance bans imposed by the Allies on other musicians patronized by the Nazis, such as the conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler.
Orff spent his later years -- he died in 1982 -- cultivating the image of a kindly old partisan of music for all, thanks to his system of childhood music education (which he had previously tried to promote through the Hitler Youth). His relations with the Nazis were mentioned even less often than those of Herbert von Karajan, who unlike Orff, had been a party member.
By the time of the Orff centenary in 1995, however, a bright searchlight was sweeping across the record of every artist who had thrived under the Third Reich. The consensus that emerged was that Orff, while no war criminal, was a thorough opportunist who allowed his works to be used to support the Nazi's cultural revolution.
So what does that have to do with his music? Orff's supporters are inclined to say that the composer's only "mistake" (aside from that unfortunate business about Mendelssohn) was to feel the artistic necessity of a kind of music that just happened to appeal to violent ideologues such as Goebbels. They point out that the Nazis also approved of Bach and Beethoven, both of whom wrote "pure" music that needs and accepts no external political program. Surely Orff should be heard likewise, as pure music.
Orff, however, didn't see it that way. He saw modernity as a played-out remnant of a red-blooded past, whose vitality could be retrieved only by creating music (or theatre or painting) that was filled with potent lessons about how life should be lived. "In everything I do, I am concerned with spiritual, not musical, debates," he said. His thoughts on the spiritual significance of accepting favours and awards from a regime that killed or exiled many of his colleagues were not recorded.
Recent critical discussion has tried to determine whether, in effect, the Nazis were right. Was Carmina Burana "the original Springtime for Hitler," as musicologist Richard Taruskin has suggested, and is it somehow dispensing a toxic mist of Nazi mythology over all who hear it?
The question is complicated by the way some critics become overwhelmed by their conviction that Orff was a populist second-rater who owed his success to his ability to rip off Stravinsky. Stung by the music's irritating popularity, they grasp for any reason to prove it guilty of something.
"Orff's rhythms are uniformly foursquare, his melodies catchy, his moods ingratiating," groused Taruskin in a New York Times article, not seeming to notice that these are also attributes of Vivaldi's Four Seasons and of most pop music. "[The music]reverberates in the head the way propaganda is supposed to."
Therefore, Taruskin concludes, Orff was a propagandist, not just for the Nazis, but for anybody, advertisers included, with an evil message to pound into your head. "His music can channel any diabolical message that text or context may suggest, and no music does it better. . . . It is just because we like it that we ought to resist it."
That statement is almost the legal definition of a guilty pleasure, which is what Carmina Burana remains for those fans who know that Orff was not a hero, and that Stravinsky's Les Noces is a more respectable piece. For everybody else, it's safe to assume that Carmina Burana does more or less what Orff wanted. It offers them a vigorous, accessible vision not of some Nazi Eden, but of an antiquity free of the restraints and dogmas of modern life.
Carmina Burana Monumental Opera plays Toronto's Air Canada Centre on Wednesday, and the Bell Centre in Montreal on March 9. Concert performances of the piece will be given by the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra at the Orpheum Theatre on March 5 and 7, by Pro Coro Canada at Edmonton's Winspear Centre on April 24, and by l'Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal at Place des Arts on May 3 and 4.