{"id":1708,"date":"2020-03-08T17:57:57","date_gmt":"2020-03-08T17:57:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/?p=1708"},"modified":"2025-05-29T18:59:56","modified_gmt":"2025-05-29T18:59:56","slug":"orff-o-fortuna-from-carmina-burana-1937","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/?p=1708","title":{"rendered":"Orff ~ O Fortuna<\/em> from Carmina Burana<\/em> (1937)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Orff ~ O Fortuna<\/em> from Carmina Burana<\/em>\u00a0(1937)<\/h1>\n

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Minnesota Dance Theater\u00a0 members performing “Carmina”<\/em><\/p>\n

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O Fortuna<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0appears at both the beginning and end of Carmina Burana<\/em>, a secular cantata and composer Carl Orff’s best-known work.\u00a0<\/strong>For better or worse it has\u00a0been “re-purposed” countless times <\/strong><\/a>for you-name-it\u00a0— even a Domino’s pizza commercial<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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It\u00a0is fair to say that for the composer there was both a blessing and a curse to\u00a0Carmina’s<\/em>\u00a0popularity. It put Orff’s name on the map worldwide and presumably earned him considerable performance royalties.<\/p>\n

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Carl Orff<\/em><\/p>\n

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However, everything else he wrote is rarely heard today making him kind of a classical music one-hit wonder (although he’s by no means the only name on that list<\/a>).\u00a0Having said that Orff did have considerable influence around the world as an educator owing to the fact that\u00a0earlier in his life\u00a0he developed and propagated a\u00a0new method of teaching\u00a0music\u00a0to\u00a0young children<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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This video\u00a0accurately translates the ancient Latin and German text and adds some sensuous computer-generated graphics of which the composer probably would have approved (the text of Carmina<\/em>\u00a0is VERY suggestive in spots). In the underlying recording in this video, David Parry conducts performers from the London area.<\/p>\n

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Personal connection<\/h4>\n

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I have sung Carmina\u00a0probably 20 times with the Minnesota Orchestra, the Mankato Symphony, and a chamber group accompanying performers from the Minnesota Dance Theater<\/a>. The latter production has a direct connection to Carl Orff.<\/strong> The founder of the company, Loyce Houlton, worked with Orff on the original choreography even though the composer had never previously thought of it as a ballet work.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Her daughter, Lise Houlton, inherited the role of MDT artistic director and continues to use these same dance moves in current performances.<\/p>\n

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Poster for a 1953 performance at (the legendary) Milan opera house La Scala conducted by the (equally legendary) German maestro Herbert von Karajan<\/em><\/p>\n

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The (identical) first and last movements of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana<\/em> are undoubtedly the most frequently borrowed 3 minutes of classical music ever written.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1709,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-classical-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.oganovic.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/Minnesota-Dance-Theater-dancers-performing-Carmina-Burana.jpg?fit=550%2C340&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1708"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1708\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3159,"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1708\/revisions\/3159"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}