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About
Carl Orff (0 July 1895 – 29 March 1982) was a German composer and music educator, best known for his cantata Carmina Burana (1937). The concepts of his Schulwerk were influential for children's music education.
Early life
Carl Orff was born in Munich on 10 July 1895, the son of Paula (Köstler) and Heinrich Orff. His family was Bavarian and was active in the Imperial German Army; his father was an army officer with strong musical interests. His paternal grandmother was Catholic of Jewish descent. At age five, Orff began to play piano, organ, and cello, and composed a few songs and music for puppet plays.
In 1911, at age 16, some of Orff's music was published. Many of his youthful works were songs, often settings of German poetry. They fell into the style of Richard Strauss and other German composers of the day, but with hints of what would become Orff's distinctive musical language.
In 1911/12, Orff wrote Zarathustra, Op. 14, an unfinished large work for baritone voice, three male choruses and orchestra, based on a passage from Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical novel Also sprach Zarathustra. The following year, he composed an opera, Gisei, das Opfer (Gisei, the Sacrifice). Influenced by the French Impressionist composer Claude Debussy, he began to use colorful, unusual combinations of instruments in his orchestration.
World War I
Moser's Musik-Lexikon states that Orff studied at the Munich Academy of Music (from 1912) until 1914. He then served in the German Army during World War I, when he was severely injured and nearly killed when a trench caved in. Afterwards, he held various positions at opera houses in Mannheim and Darmstadt, later returning to Munich to pursue his music studies.
The 1920s
In the mid-1920s, Orff began to formulate a concept he called elementare Musik, or elemental music, which was based on the unity of the arts symbolized by the ancient Greek Muses, and involved tone, dance, poetry, image, design, and theatrical gesture. Like many other composers of the time, he was influenced by the Russian-French émigré Igor Stravinsky. But while others followed the cool, balanced neoclassic works of Stravinsky, it was works such as Les noces (The Wedding), a pounding, quasi-folkloric evocation of prehistoric wedding rites, that appealed to Orff. He also began adapting musical works of earlier eras for contemporary theatrical presentation, including Claudio Monteverdi's opera L'Orfeo (1607). Orff's German version, Orpheus, was staged under his direction in 1925 in Mannheim, using some of the instruments that had been used in the original 1607 performance. The passionately declaimed opera of Monteverdi's era was almost unknown in the 1920s, however, and Orff's production met with reactions ranging from incomprehension to ridicule.
In 1924 Dorothee Günther [de] and Orff founded the Günther School for gymnastics, music, and dance in Munich. Orff was there as the head of a department from 1925 until the end of his life, and he worked with musical beginners. There he developed his theories of music education, having constant contact with children. In 1930, Orff published a manual titled Schulwerk, in which he shares his method of conducting. Before writing Carmina Burana, he also edited 17th-century operas. However, these various activities brought him very little money.
Nazi era
Orff's relationship with German national-socialism and the Nazi Party has been a matter of considerable debate and analysis. His Carmina Burana was hugely popular in Nazi Germany after its premiere in Frankfurt in 1937. Given Orff's previous lack of commercial success, the monetary factor of Carmina Burana's acclaim was significant to him. But the composition, with its unfamiliar rhythms, was also denounced with racist taunts. He was one of the few German composers under the Nazi regime who responded to the official call to write new incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream after the music of Felix Mendelssohn had been banned. Defenders of Orff note that he had already composed music for this play as early as 1917 and 1927, long before this was a favor for the Nazi regime.
Orff was a friend of Kurt Huber, one of the founders of the resistance movement Weiße Rose (the White Rose), who was condemned to death by the Volksgerichtshof and executed by the Nazis in 1943. Orff by happenstance called at Huber's house on the day after his arrest. Huber's distraught wife, Clara, begged Orff to use his influence to help her husband, but he declined her request. If his friendship with Huber was ever discovered, he told her, he would be "ruined". On 19 January 1946 Orff wrote a letter to the deceased Huber. Later that month, he met with Clara Huber, who asked him to contribute to a memorial volume for her husband. Orff's letter was published in that collection the following year. In it, Orff implored him for forgiveness.
He had a long friendship with German-Jewish musicologist, composer and refugee Erich Katz, who fled Nazi Germany in 1939.
Denazification
According to Canadian historian Michael H. Kater, during Orff's denazification process in Bad Homburg, Orff claimed that he had helped establish the White Rose resistance movement in Germany. There was no evidence for this other than his own word, and other sources dispute his claim. Kater also made a particularly strong case that Orff collaborated with Nazi German authorities.
However, in Orff's denazification file, discovered by Viennese historian Oliver Rathkolb in 1999, no remark on the White Rose is recorded; and in Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits (2000) Kater recanted his earlier accusations to some extent.
In any case, Orff's assertion that he had been anti-Nazi during the war was accepted by the American denazification authorities, who changed his previous category of "gray unacceptable" to "gray acceptable", enabling him to continue to compose for public presentation, and to enjoy the royalties that the popularity of Carmina Burana had earned for him.
After World War II
Most of Orff's later works – Antigonae (1949), Oedipus der Tyrann (Oedipus the Tyrant, 1958), Prometheus (1968), and De temporum fine comoedia (Play on the End of Times, 1971) – were based on texts or topics from antiquity. They extend the language of Carmina Burana in interesting ways, but they are expensive to stage and (on Orff's own admission) are not operas in the conventional sense. Live performances of them have been few, even in Germany.