Up to now I have used this alphabetical series to look at visual art. This time I am going to focus on a musical piece. In her 2017 TV series Tunes for Tyrants: Music and Power, Suzy Klein has this to say about Carl Orff’s famous Carmina Burana:
There’s one piece written in the 1930s that I think more than any other captures the toxic spirit of the age. Carmina Burana by Carl Orff stirs us up to feel tense excitement with its violent power. Its hypnotic rhythms chimed brilliantly with the frenetic atmosphere of Nazi Germany, where it swept the crowds off their feet. The Nazi party newspaper called it “The kind of clear, stormy, and yet disciplined music our time requires.” Carmina Burana has become one of the most performed pieces of classical pieces, a staple of popular culture, used by film, TV, and advertising, a cliché of macho, apocalyptic glory. The music has long outlived the politics of the time. But is there something inherently fascist about the bombastic, unreflective emotion written into its very notes? We might like to think that the music we still love today has nothing to do with the dark and distant politics of a terrible time, but I’m not sure it’s quite that simple. I suppose if listening to music can’t make you a better, more moral person, nor can it by the same token make you an immoral person. That said, Carmina Burana, for me, is the ultimate piece of empty music. A load of sound and fury signifying nothing. It pushes our buttons and it tries to provoke our basest emotions. I cannot help but hear the hate-filled ideology it grew out of when I hear those notes. And our willingness today to still submit to its power carries with it, I think, a health warning, that when we embrace music like this, we also have to recognise that it came out of a profoundly evil regime.
Klein’s commentary is seasoned with “I think” and “for me” and is therefore very subjective, and indeed emotional rather than intellectual, but she misses several important points in her assessment. Firstly, that Orff’s relationship with the Nazis was an ambiguous one. He was not a party member, he was one of the countless thousands (millions?) of Germans who timidly got on with life and survived under the regime. That might have been cowardly, but Klein herself acknowledges elsewhere in her series that so many artists – and ordinary people – did just that. He took commissions that did not do him honour, such as submitting a new score for A Midsummer Night’s Dream to replace Felix Mendelssohn’s. The ambiguity of Orff’s relationship with the regime does not, of course, free him from its taint. However, it does make it legitimate to look at his work and ask whether it did in fact “grow out of” a hate-filled ideology and a profoundly evil regime simply because it was composed in it. There is sufficient evidence to say that it did not.
Klein’s reaction is to one part of Carmina Burana only – the dramatic, primary-coloured ‘O Fortuna’ that brackets the whole. The work is composed of settings of twenty-four medieval poems, of which ‘O Fortuna’ is only one. None of the other poems is given such a setting. What ‘O Fortuna’ does is grab our attention and demand that we listen to what is going to come after. Klein’s attention is fixed solely on one twenty-fourth of the whole.
But even if we look at ‘O Fortuna’ on its own, it can’t be judged as Nazi propaganda. The words, as with the other poems, are profoundly subversive to Nazi ideology. The poems were composed by thirteenth-century Goliards, disaffected young student clergy who, from within the monolith of medieval Christianity, wrote secular and satirical verse. In monolithic 1930s Germany, clothed within their original Latin, the words of ‘O Fortuna’ may seem neutral. But consider how they would have been heard if translated into German. Orff titles this piece ‘Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi’, which we could render as ‘Fate Empress of the World’. The words “Imperatrix Mundi” are not to be found in the original, they are Orff’s. When you consider that one possible translation into German of the word “imperatrix” is “Führerin,” you see a challenge emerging. Hitlerism was an ideology that privileged the notion of “will,” specifically the will of the Führer, as the governing force of historical change. Fate, on the other hand, “strikes down the strong” and, by inference, carries away the empire-builder and the visionary. ‘O Fortuna’ is a clarion counter-manifestation to Nazism.
Before it was ever called clear, stormy, and disciplined by someone writing for the Nazi party newspaper – someone who also had clearly only listened to the opening section, and moreover was only semi-literate in Latin – Carmina Burana was heavily criticised for being “un-German” and “pornographic.”[*] How it managed to gain official favour is testament to the whims, unreliability, and ultimate stupidity of Nazi artistic criticism.
It is possible that Orff slipped one past the Nazis. I ask why, when an earlier contributor to Suzy Klein’s series had been able to see Shostakovich as – perhaps – secretly slapping Stalin’s face, Klein herself could not see the possibility that Orff was secretly slapping Hitler’s.
You know, I know, and Suzy Klein knows, that any oppressive regime is facilitated not by its handful of fanatics and enforcers, but by its millions of ordinary people who keep their heads down and get on with their lives. She makes a similar point herself, elsewhere in the series, to the effect that people will act to ensure the safety of their families and themselves. Such people are shopkeepers, civil servants, postal delivery people, midwives, street-sweepers, carpenters, electricians, nurses, doctors, you, and I. Some of them occupy positions that are more prominent, say in art or music, and when their names live on it seems that the compromises they have had to make in order to survive are amplified above the ordinary. But they are not amplified. They are exactly of the same order as the compromises that we would all have made.
Klein seems to distrust the emotionalism of Carmina Burana. But you can’t really march to it the way you might be able to march to Die Fahne Hoch. Its relentless rhythm is not the tread of jackboots, it is the musical embodiment of fate, it is the steady rattle of the wheel of fortune. Emotion is a legitimate component of the artist’s toolbox, to be applied lightly with a fine brush or heavily with a bricklayer’s trowel. Even if Orff’s intention was to overwhelm us with his opening to Carmina Burana, the emotions evoked express his own fascination with a historical, intellectual disaffection with the monolithic. Let me put this personally: I could not relate at all to Orff if I had not detected immediately a huge amount of sheer effrontery in this music.
I will offer an obvious caveat. My regular readers know my long-time interest in W.G. Sebald, and in his great concern that Germany’s Nazi past had been whitewashed and its Jewish component forgotten. In pointing out flaws in Suzy Klein’s reasoning I do not intend to whitewash Orff. Denazification labelled him as grey, and grey he remains. I thoroughly enjoyed Klein’s series, and commend it. However, let me end with another quote from 2017, this time from one of Hilary Mantel’s Reith Lectures: “For a person who seeks safety and authority, history is the wrong place to look. Any worthwhile history is in a constant state of self-questioning […]”[**]
[*]Unsigned text, http://www.emmaus.de/ingos_texte/carmina.html
[**] Hilary Mantel. “The Day is for the Living.” BBC Reith Lectures, 13th June 2017. bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b08tcbrp
Taxonomy Domine 