In the 1880s John Symonds created Wine, Women, and Song-the first English translation of the manuscript, which Orff would encounter sixty years later. The poems are in Medieval Latin, Germanic Latin, Middle-High German, Old French, Provençal, and some of the pieces are even “macaronic,” meaning they are a jumble of different languages. Most of them rhyme and have an irresistibly sing-song quality (they are a delight to recite!) The goliards’ facility with language enlivens all of the poems of Carmina. (Primogeniture, or the passing of all inheritance to the first born son, meant that there were many second- and third-born sons in the Middle Ages who went to the Church and the Academy, whether or not they were cut out for monastic or scholastic life). The untitled 13th-century manuscript the poems of Carmina came from is the richest collected source of poetry created by the goliards-groups of itinerant scholars and defrocked priests-learned, literary men who, for whatever reason, fell out with the academic and religious institutions of medieval Europe and made a living entertaining hosts (and each other) with their too-clever words and catchy rhymes. He was instantly entranced:Ĭarmina is a magnificent piece of music, but surely part of its magic of Carmina stems from the pure pleasure of its text-fluid with the beautiful vowels of Latin, dancing in double rhyme (it’s most likely that the poems were sung, though music notation doesn’t survive)-and fully alive with the wit, personality, and emotions of its creators. At a second-hand bookstore, Carl Orff encountered this image in a volume containing some of that manuscripts poetry, in translation, bearing the tawdry title Wine, Women, and Song. In one sense, it began with the page to the left: the first from an untitled 13th-century manuscript, featuring Fortune at her wheel. “Beuern” refers to the Benedictine monastery in Bavaria where, in 1803, a collection of thirteenth-century songs and poems was uncovered. That mouthful of a title reveals several things about Carmina’s origins and its composer’s intent. Carmina Burana: Cantiones profanæ cantoribus et choris cantandæ comitantibus instrumentis atque imaginibus magicis (“Songs of Beuern: Secular songs for singers and choruses to be sung together with instruments and magic images”) first came to life in Germany more than eighty years ago, in 1937. A thunderous low D, the portentous crash of a gong, dozens of voices crying out, “O! Fortuna:” the unmistakable beginning of one of the most famous and popular choral-orchestral works of the twentieth century, Carl Orff’s cantata, Carmina Burana.
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