7/25/2023 0 Comments Carmina burana composer“Carmina” is a reliable box office banger, but one that does little to immerse audiences in the challenging debates and tendencies of modern art. It has lodged its way into the cultural vocabulary, sampled and soundtracked to a degree hardly rivaled by any other in the classic canon. The result was an extremely popular and recognizable work of classical music. Originally premiered in 1937, “Carmina Burana” was the result of years of effort by composer Carl Orff to craft a work consonant with the ethos and cultural guidelines of his new Nazi overlords. Unlike those others, it is indisputably a text of the Nazi era, and while it may not qualify as “Nazi art,” as Anne-Charlotte Rémond of France Musique rightly put it, it was a work of art “made for Nazis.” The disproportion between the fame of “Carmina Burana” and the lack of deliberation on its troublesome origins demands a closer look. Yet “Carmina Burana,” an extraordinarily popular and recognizable work in the classical repertoire, has almost entirely evaded the “working through the past” conversation. While these people and places were rightly seen as tenders of the flame of antisemitism, in no sense did they produce Nazi content. Festival destinations like Bayreuth and Oberammergau (home of the Passion Play) that long eluded denazification have, albeit only recently, embraced an ethos of reform. The legacies of Wagner and Nietzsche, German geniuses long dead before the advent of the Nazi scourge, still buckle under the taint.
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