Carl Orff's hundredth birthday had hardly begun to approach
than there erupted fierce arguments about the composer. They were
concerned less with his work than with his life, and particularly with
his behaviour during the Third Reich and in the years immediately after
the war. New investigations into Orff's life and work, to which the Orff
Centre in Munich rendered an outstanding service, went round the world
in crassly-expressed news flashes that raised some (false) points. This
triggered off confusion and consternation: Was Orff a Nazi? Was Orff a
liar - someone who, like a Bavarian Astutulus, had cunningly led the
occupying authorities by the nose? This was grist to their mill for
those who had always known, like Gerald Abraham, who had always
maintained that there were suspicious elements in the German's work,
that "rhythmically hypnotic, totally diatonic neo-primitivism" that
allows itself to be so easily connected with the stamping columns of the
Third Reich. And promptly on the 28th January of this year, London
Weekend Television, in a polemic disguised as "Documentation" presented
SS-troops marching to Orff's music and showed pictures of dead bodies in
concentration camps.
O Fortuna velut luna! Carl Orff has often been portrayed and
also misrepresented in his long life, though hardly ever with such
malicious over-simplification as in this year of celebration and
jubilation. There has never been any lack of distorted pictures, of
mischievous personal descriptions of such multiform and protean
characters. Already in the time of the Weimar Republic, Orff was
suspiciously regarded by the conservatives as an anti-traditionalist and
a taboo-breaker, largely because of the nature of his performances, but
also as a music pedagogue: Alexander Berrsche spoke of Hottentot rhythm
with regard to the Schulwerk. Opinions such as these lasted well into
the time of the Nazis when his works were successful in spite of all
opposition, but also had to survive some highly officious forms of
excommunication; in this connection Goebbels' music adviser, Heinz
Drewes, described Carmina Burana without hesitation as Bavarian
Niggermusic. After the war Orff really fell between two stools; for
those who belonged to the aesthetic of music attached to the Viennese
School he was considered for several decades - as was his contemporary
Paul Hindemith - to be a non-person. In the seventies the taboos relaxed
somewhat. Orff's name surfaced again in musicological seminars and in
the company of critics. The theoretical boycott had hardly harmed his
works. They had remained young through being performed. In today's
descriptions of music history there are frequent conciliatory attempts
to attach the label "populism" to Orff - in reference books he appears
as the director of a musical folkpark, in which people like Prokofiev
and Gershwin go in and out, where children eagerly practise on
xylophones, where open-air performances for huge audiences take place
and where the fence between serious and light music is lower than it is
elsewhere. It remains open to conjecture if that is his definitive
place.
A hundred years of Orff, a hundred years of judgements and
prejudices. My short lecture cannot give voice to all the stupid and
wise, accurate and inaccurate, intelligently witty and plainly
nonsensical statements that have been made about Orff. But thirty
minutes will serve at least to place Orff in his time and to make his
life and work understandable in reference to his environment. Let us try
then; it is partly political, partly the music history of our time, and
even partly an appreciative history of his work, the time that divides
us from him being so short.
*
When Carl Orff died in 1982 at the age of 86, he had wandered
through four epochs in the course of his life: the Empire, the Weimar
Republic, National Socialism and finally the time after 1945 - since
1949 leading to the second, the Bonn Republic. I say "wandered through"
deliberately, for one can hardly say of Orff that he had a particular,
conscious or significant relationship to time or political situation. In
general, for many reasons, musicians are less fixated on politics than
writers; though of course there is the exception of the political
musician: one has only to think of Liszt, Paderewski or of Henze, Nono
and Theodorakis in our time. Orff did not belong to this type; he was
totally a musician and nothing else, concerned with musical, not
political effect, obstinately and obsessively committed to the service
of Music. Not once did the problems of musicians, such as copyright or
organisational questions concerning the position of the music profession
so decisively interest him, that he was prepared to work for them
within a professional organisation - as did both Richard Strauss and
Werner Egk. So we hardly find any trace of specific statements about the
times, the political and social conditions in which he grew up and
developed. Certainly, the times through which he wandered left their
stamp on him; for him to have lived in another century is unthinkable;
he was a twentieth century man, coming from, alienated and escaping from
the nineteenth century. But the effects of time and politics on his
biography are nevertheless more indirect, conveyed almost
coincidentally; and I can only warn those curious researchers who are
interested in themes such as "Orff and the First World War", "Orff and
the Weimar Republic", "Orff and the Adenauer Era", that they will hardly
find what they are seeking in the sparse sources. I am heretical enough
to add: even the theme "Orff and National Socialism" reveals in the end
little in the way of information or even anything sensational. Orff
went through time, through many times with the gestures of a
sleepwalker; he gladly gave the time the chance to do something for him;
though he would leave it to run its course with indifference or defiant
fatalism.
The time before the First World War, the time of the Empire and
particularly of the Prince Regent, was indeed a time through which the
descendent of a well-educated Munich officer's family, born in 1895
would have lived. It was rather like the Bavarian Belle Époque. Those
familiar with the reminiscences of Hermann Heimpel and Karl Alexander or
the historical writings of Karl Möckl will have gained the impression
that only those who lived through this time would have known the real
douceur de vivre. The young Orff grew up in his parents' house free from
any material worries. He was not drawn to military honours but rather
to books, musical scores and old languages. He was already having piano
lessons at the age of five. He made up the music to accompany his puppet
theatre. The first song cycles were written. From the autumn of 1912 he
studied composition with Anton Beer-Walbrunn, a friend of Max Reger's
who embodied the modem trend at the Academy of Music in Munich. Orff
strove for a theatrical career; he achieved this by working with Hermann
Zilcher as a repetiteur with the necessary pianistic gifts. From
1915-1917 he was a conductor at the theatre called the Munich
Kammerspiele. Karl Marx, later to become a friend, noticed the
fair-haired young man with the characteristic profile, who passed the
time during the troop medical inspection in May 1917 by studying the
pocket score of Reger's string quartet in F# minor. After a short period
of compulsory duty with the First Royal Regiment of Bavarian Field
Artillery in Poland, where he was buried alive and became consequently
ill, Orff worked as a conductor at the National Theatre in Mannheim, and
then at the Court Theatre in Darmstadt; he returned to Munich in 1919
and dedicated himself to composing songs. Taking lessons (amongst others
from Pfitzner and Kaminski) and giving lessons (amongst others to
Werner Egk), progressing slowly, discovering much, searching doggedly,
interested in old scores, he became fundmentally an eclectic and
self-taught working artist.
In the stormy, culturally so productive years of the Weimar
Republic, the "Roaring Twenties", one would at first glance have taken
Orff to be a stranger. Was he not primarily interested in music
education, a man who, with Dorothee Günther, was working at the
revitalisation of Dance and Movement, who was composing songs with piano
accompaniment, and who was preparing his Schulwerk? One thereby
overlooks two points, of course: first that the school music of the
Weimar Republic, as it had been newly conceived in 1920, had a
thoroughly political character, that it was in fact a showcase for a
political education of the people - one has only to mention the name of
Leo Kestenberg. Within this scheme there was room for much of what was
currently being sung, played and newly discovered, from the songs of the
Youth Movement to the eagerly collected "Verklingende Weisen" of folk
songs and hymns - not to forget the work and protest songs of the time.
In the Memorandum concerning the total involvement of Music in school
and society (1923), conceived by Kestenberg and issued by the Prussian
Ministry of Culture, one reads: Music must once more become a part of
the life of all our people, its practice must lead to personal activity,
to singing and playing oneself. The boat builder on his boat who plays
the accordion, the worker who goes from his workplace to the rehearsal
room of his male choir - they are perhaps as inwardly rich as the
subscribers to big symphony concerts who go on a fixed day and time to
hear a familiar symphony conducted by their favourite conductor (Quoted
by Heide Hammel, Die Schulmusik in der Weimarer Republik, Stuttgart
1990, p.140). On the other hand the music of the time, particularly the
avant garde, addressed itself with educational pathos to the general
public, to nation and state. Educational works were produced not only in
the field of contemporary literature - Brecht, Bronnen, Kaiser - but
also in the field of contemporary music. And Orff also had his place in
this spectrum, formed from expressionistic world-friendliness,
humanist-social involvement and a revolutionary agitprop mood, that
ranged from Fritz Jöde to Paul Hindemith and Hanns Eisler; it is no
surprise that he set poems by Franz Werfel, wrote choral pieces to texts
by Bert Brecht, and worked together with Kestenberg and Hermann
Scherchen.
Had the Weimar Republic been granted a longer life, Orff might
have become a musical educator of the people within the limits of
democratic conditions. None of his undertakings were foreign to the
political-educational aspirations of the First Republic. He was no
conductor of worker choirs; his combinations and predilections, his
educational models were different; above all, they were musically, not
politically motivated. But with his inclination to combine old and
contemporary, to bring new life to old instruments and performance
techniques and at the same time delivering some well-aimed blows at the
middle class music culture as an example: degrading the pianoforte to
the status of percussion instrument! Considering all this he certainly
did not stand alone during these years.
*
Orff was a late-developer. It was his problem, perhaps his
misfortune, that he did not find his own unchangeable style in the
Weimar years, but only later. The musician Orff, as we know him, was bom
in the thirties. In June 1937 on the occasion of the dress rehearsal of
Carmina Burana, when in relation to his publisher he dissociated
himself from his previous compositional style and disowned the early
offspring of his muse, the National Socialists had already been in power
in Germany for four years. The conclusive breakthrough of the composer
Carl Orff, his rise to European, and later worldwide fame and
significance fell (sadly) in the Nazi time.
Did this rise have anything materially to do with the Nazi
time? Did an elective affinity exist? Did the new "national community"
offer a sounding board for the work of the composer in his middle
forties? Fierce battles have raged about this in Germany and elsewhere
in most recent times - and not only then! There is no doubt that some
elements can be clarified - and even the most recent controversy about
Michael Kater's study Carl Orff in the Third Reich has contributed much
to this clarification if one disregards some of the terrible
simplifications appearing in the media. Orff was no Nazi. Inwardly he
had nothing to do with National Socialism; he had absolutely no
political aspirations, neither before 1933 nor after (and also not after
1945). He was a composer and he wanted to have his works performed. He
believed in his gift, if you will: in his mission. Composers have a hard
time in totalitarian regimes - the biographies of Schönberg, Hindemith
and Shostakovich in our century, to name but these three, show this very
clearly. For composers in this situation there is fundamentally only
one alternative: to emigrate or to remain. To go underground, to appear
in clandestine publications, to paint pictures in secret, this is all
possible within limits for writers and painters who oppose the status
quo, but remains denied to the composer. For the Gods have ordained that
there shall be a performance before musical fame can be achieved.
Music, particularly dramatic music, is not simply there; it consists of
notes in a score. It is an arduous process, it demands preparation,
contracts, rehearsals, singers, an orchestra, the contribution of many
people, inclusion in theatre repertoires, advertising in the media -
already a colossal collective endeavour in normal times, how much more
so under the requirements of a malicious, unpredictable, capricious
system, often led from different sources of power that did not agree and
were in fact rivals! I know only a few leading composers of the
twentieth century who deliberately withdrew from the music business and
regarded their scores as private works available for future generations,
quite unconcerned about their being realised. The most significant of
these was Anton Webem, tragically killed in 1945 by the bullet of an
American soldier in the Occupation Forces. But this was not the normal
way; it requires an extreme, idealistic understanding of musical
workmanship. Most composers do not want to withdraw. Even in the "Reich
des Menschenfressers" (regime of the cannibal) - according to Thomas
Mann - they wanted to have their works heard and made available to
others. To achieve this of course one had to make compromises. As Carl
Orff also had to in the Third Reich.
Did he go too far in this respect? Orff's contribution as a
composer to the Olympic Games in 1936 does not constitute a corpus
delicti. On that occasion the representatives of all nations, including
those who later fought against Germany, were sitting at Hitler's feet in
the Olympic Stadium in Berlin. (Kurt Schumacher, at that time in a
concentration camp, did not refrain from pointing this out with biting
sarcasm in the speeches he made after the war.) Shortly before the
eleventh hour in 1944, Orff was able to avoid having to compose "battle
music" for the weekly cinema news reel. The fact that he was prepared to
make a new musical setting for Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, a
suggestion that even Hans Pfitzner firmly rejected, is more
questionable. To manage to become a musical replacement for the "Jew
Mendelssohn" at the particular behest of a top functionary of the Nazi
Party - that appears to us today as a bad example of kowtowing to the
powerful of that time. Certainly, Orff's Shakespeare plans were
long-standing, they went back to when he was conductor at the Munich
Kammerspiele in Falckenberg's time. Orff's reasons were aesthetic, not
political. He had never found Mendelssohn's stage music appropriate - it
was too gentle, too sweet. He thought he could match Shakespeare's
drama more nearly with his own. The argument that it was immaterial to
Orff that Mendelssohn was a Jew (and this is verifiable in the available
source material!) can hardly be accepted unexamined; it overestimates
the scope of musical autonomy in a state committed to a particular
Weltanschauung. The National Socialists merely added Orff's aesthetic
arguments to their other political triumphs. They would have taken no
notice of his insistence on the absolute power of music. For the Nazis
there was nothing musical that was not also political.
This is how the Nazis were - and Orff had assessed the time
correctly when in the fairy tale play Die Kluge (1943) the imprisoned
father sings: Those who have power are in the right, and those who are
in the right will turn it to their own uses, for force rules over
everything. In this sentence one could clearly have recognised, as in
the mischievous exchange of the three vagabonds (Faith is struck dead.
Justice lives in great penury...), an allusion to the conditions current
at the time. I only fear that Orff saw politics in this light at all
times in his life. It might not always have appeared so tyrannical and
criminal as in the Third Reich, but for a man who wanted to create, to
produce, it could be dangerously distracting and disturbing. If the
powers in control gave music full scope and freedom, all was well - that
is why Orff had absolutely no problems or difficulties with either of
the two democratic republics, those of Weimar and Bonn. His musical
realm should remain without disturbances or disputes, this was the most
important maxim. His ideal was represented by an inwardness protected
from those in power (not by those in power!). And for Orff, tyranny was
mainly evil and wicked because it destroyed the autonomy of the Arts,
because everything was sucked into the undertow of politics.
Only these conclusions make it understandable that the friends
Kurt Huber and Carl Orff, according to trustworthy witnesses, talked
exclusively about music, and not about politics, on the many occasions
when they met. And one also understands Orff's first reaction to Huber's
arrest, as transmitted by Clara Huber: Now I shall no longer be able to
compose. Politics had overpowered Music. That Carl Orff later tried
nevertheless to make political capital out of his musical association
with his friend, or, more accurately, tried to avert the possible harm
of a ban on performances of his works imposed by the American Occupation
Forces - that was rather a kind of satyric drama after the end of the
tragedy. For if Orff was certainly no Nazi, and if he heartily despised
the Nazis -he was also certainly no resistance fighter. Nevertheless how
can one, how may one - especially when born at a later time -so
ingenuously expect this from an artist living in the Third Reich?
When Orff had survived the war and the Third Reich, when his
"Bavarian Play' Die Bernauerin, could be performed in Stuttgart in 1947,
when his post-war and mature productions began: Antigone (1949),
Trionfo di Afrodite (1953), Oedipus the King (1959), Prometheus (1968),
the Easter and Christmas plays and finally De temporum fine comoedia
(1973), he seemed finally to have circumnavigated the dangerous cliffs
of the first half of his life. Orff was an established master. The young
Republic - also establishing and consolidating itself - was adorned by
his fame. In 1950-1960 he directed a master-class for composition at the
Staatliche Hochschule für Musik (State College of Music) in Munich. In
1961 a training centre and seminar for the development of the
Orff-Schulwerk - later the Orff-Institut - was opened at the Mozarteum
in Salzburg. His ideas about music education, like his dramatic works,
spread all over the world. They found acceptance in kindergartens and
schools, in teacher training and adult education, in remedial education
and in music therapy. Orff was compensated for the withdrawal of a large
number of musicologists and critics through many friendships with
philosophers, historians and philologists. His home in Diessen, where he
both worked and lived, became a place of pilgrimage. It was here that
the composer worked in the early morning hours amongst his books and
collections, here he heard the "Amixl" (dialect for the blackbird in Die
Bernauerin) singing and here he looked at the "Mond-Eiche" (the oak
tree from which the moon hung in DerMond) in the park. The comfortable
country house with its old family pictures, his wife Liselotte's Iceland
ponies, the Chinese and Javanese gongs, the cymbals, bells and drums
seemed - with characteristically different emphases - to be comparable
to Richard Strauss' Villa in Garmisch. Since Richard Wagner and Richard
Strauss there has been no composer living in Bavaria who has achieved
such undisputed world-wide recognition as Carl Orff.
We could thus say goodbye to this idyll as a happy ending to
Orff's long and sometimes stormy journey through life - were there not
in the end one question, as with any life's work, what remains? What
remains of Orff's personality, of Orff's music? To try to answer this
question we must look back again at the life of this Bavarian master -
this time not confronting the political world, but looking at the
musical and music historical connections with his life.
*
When Carl Orff began to experiment and to compose before the
First World War, the language of late romanticism was prevalent in song,
in chamber music and in music for the stage - in all the genres in
which the young musician tried his hand. Refinement was trumps. The
tonal system was extended and stretched without being broken. The ear
was gripped and tickled by a subtle and appealing harmony. Extramusical
objects left their mark: Oriental pictures, hanging gardens, the
sensuous magic of exotic landscapes, flowers and animals. A select,
precious, aristocratic world stood opposite the real ugliness of the
cities, factories and machines. The musical echo of these contrasting
creations ranged from Debussy to Strauss, from Pfitzner to the young
Schönberg.
This late romantic world collapsed in the First World War.
Strictly speaking its demise started earlier; the catastrophe only made
the occurrence clearly visible and audible. In poetry, music and art
there was a whirl of new experiments, new starting points and
beginnings. Above all the musical cards were reshuffled. Much was
clarified and simplified. In the course of time Orff's compositions also
became simpler, more elemental; the linear became more prominent,
rhythm, at first barely significant adapted itself to the word;
dissonances, but not the kind appearing to require resolution,
"Personanzklänge" as they were later called, started the replacement of
functional harmony.
Hans Joachim Moser, Werner Thomas, Wilhelm Keller and Horst
Leuchtmann have analysed the elements of this new tonal language: the
monotony, the repetition, a consciously barren tonal landscape, a
musical principle of economy, ostinato techniques, the restriction of
melody and others besides. The music brings about the most concise
expression, the narrowest enveloping of the words. It releases and
gathers its rhythmic and musical energies. Once the musical formula is
found, as Orff says, it remains the same for each repetition. The
conciseness of the verbal expression makes the repetition and its effect
possible. Listening to Orff's music with today's ears, with the ears of
the nineties, some of it sounds like an early foretaste of something
like Techno; and parallels to Rock, to Klang-art cannot be ignored. The
uncovering of musical energies in pulsing, almost toneless rhythm, in
stamping, thundering and drumming seems in no way to have exhausted all
its possibilities. Carl Orff may be considered as one of the forerunners
of those placing such a concentration on the value of rhythmic movement
in music. Melodies become sequences of notes. The flow of speech is
stemmed, breaks up in pieces till only sounds, crackles and hisses
remain. Of course a possible surplus of monotony in Orff's music dramas
is carefully balanced through new forms of recitativo secco and arioso,
through melody that is freely modal and through orchestral primary
colours produced by an orchestra that, in contrast to that of the
classic-romantic period, consists of xylophones, percussion, double
basses, woodwind and brass.
This is no longer traditional music. In the music dramas of his
mature years, as spacious as they are concentrated, Orff distances
himself ever more decisively than before from the dominant music schools
of thought of the twentieth century. His way is different from the
musical constructivism of the Viennese School - but he also leaves the
great stimulus and source of his youth, Igor Stravinsky, somewhat far
behind him. In a certain sense, in turning away from opera and turning
towards drama, he is continuing the work of Richard Wagner - except that
he supports the words much more radically than the master of Bayreuth,
and in contrast to him avoids using the symphonic commentary of an
orchestra opposite the singing and reciting human voice. In the end,
practically all that remains is the language, Greek or Latin, old
Bavarian or old French, and it is both inexhaustible and at the same
time the hidden source and storehouse of all tonal and rhythmic energy.
"There would be no sound, where the word is lacking" - One could thus
adapt Stefan George's verse in relation to Orff.
Orff's music, his mousike - I use the Greek expression
purposely - offers less to the ear than traditional opera. But on the
other hand it includes all the senses; for it is not only tone but also
dance, not only sound but also play, not only song but also scene,
theatre - it is music in the sense of an art that unifies and embraces
all the other arts, as the Greeks first conceived it.
The idea of such a music, one that is constantly renewing
itself through its language forms, is perhaps the boldest idea that the
musician Carl Orff has left to posterity. It reaches far beyond his own
work and its future historical evaluation. Therein lies its significance
for the future. In a world that grows ever closer its separate
individualities are maintained through their languages. Out of all
languages, every single one - this is Orff's idea - music can be made.
Such a music would no longer be an artificial creation of its own,
removed from the visual and language arts, it would remain closely
connected with the cultural archetypes of mankind, their languages and
speakers. And it would thus to some extent be both universal and
indi-vidual, both archaic and modern: a foretaste of the new music of
one world.
Translated by Margaret Murray
Hans Maier, University Professor, born 18 June 1931 in Freiburg
im Breisgau. Studied in Freiburg, Munich and Paris. From 1962 Professor
for Political Science at the University of Munich; 1970-1986 Bavarian
State Minister for Education and Culture; since 1988 full Professor for
Christian Weltanschauung, Religious and Cultural Theory at the
University of Munich. Several publications about constitutional and
administrative history, state church politics, and the history of the
Christian political parties.
© 1995 Hans Maier
Produced by Schott Musik International, Mainz
In cooperation with Orff-Zentrum Munich
Orff's Musical and Moral Failings
By RICHARD TARUSKIN NYT May 6, 2001
http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?query=orff&date=full
Was Carl Orff a Nazi?
DON'T look now, but Leon Botstein and the
American Symphony Orchestra are teasing us again about music and
politics. In recent concerts they have given us politically excruciating
but musically attractive cantatas by Franz Schmidt, who toadied to
Hitler, and Sergei Prokofiev, who did it to Stalin. As a follow-up, one
might expect a program of musically excruciating but politically
attractive works.
But no, we don't need the American Symphony for that. Such
pieces are all over the map, what with Joseph Schwantner's banalities in
praise of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ("New Morning for the
World"), John Harbison's in furtherance of Middle East peace ("Four
Psalms"), Ellen Taaffe Zwilich's in defense of the environment (Symphony
No. 4: "The Gardens") or Philip Glass's on behalf of every piety in
sight (Symphony No. 5: "Requiem, Bardo, Nirmanakaya"), just to name a
few.
Instead, the same formula, with its implied torture to our
collective conscience, will be ridden again, pitting politics everybody
loves to hate against music many hate to love but find vexingly
irresistible. Under the title "After `Carmina Burana': A Historical
Perspective," the orchestra is sponsoring a daylong symposium next
Sunday at LaGuardia High School near Lincoln Center, and a concert on
May 16 at Avery Fisher Hall, devoted to
Carl Orff's "Catulli Carmina" (1943) and his rarely heard "Trionfo di Afrodite" (1951).
Together with "
Carmina Burana" (1936), which,
as it happens, Zdenek Macal and the New Jersey Symphony will perform
beginning on May 16 at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark,
these two cantatas or, as originally intended, choral ballets make up a
trilogy called "Trionfi," first performed at La Scala in Milan in 1953.
Widely regarded as a magnified (or inflated) and popularized (or dumbed-
down) sequel to (or knockoff of) "Les Noces," Stravinsky's choral
ballet of 1923, "Trionfi" stands as a monument to . . . what? The
triumph of artistic independence (and prescient accessibility) in an age
of musical hermeticism and conformism mandated by the cold war? The
persistence of instinctive affirmation of life in an age of
thermonuclear threat and existential disillusion? The survival of
Nazi-inspired artistic barbarism under cover of classical simplicity?
The possibilities don't end there, although these three have
had vocal exponents, and they will probably get a heated airing at the
symposium. But why, exactly, has the Nazi taint stuck so doggedly to
Orff, who (unlike Herbert von Karajan or Elisabeth Schwarzkopf) never
belonged to the Nazi Party? Is it because two-thirds of his trilogy was
very successfully performed under Nazi auspices? If being loved by the
Nazis were enough to damn, we would have to take leave not only of Orff,
and not only of Wagner, but also of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. Is it
because Orff's cantatas are the only musical fruits of the Third Reich
(apart, perhaps, from the later, less popular operas of Richard Strauss)
to survive in active repertory today? Then why do we tolerate
all that Soviet music?
Or is it merely because the Nazis offer an "objective" pretext
for dismissal to those who subjectively disapprove of Orff's music for
other reasons: reasons having to do, could it be, with prudery?
Unlike Prokofiev and Shostakovich, Orff never wrote music in
actual praise of his Leader or explicitly touting a totalitarian party
line. Prokofiev's "Toast to Stalin," performed by the American Symphony
in December, is fairly well known. Shostakovich's film score for "The
Fall of Berlin" ends with a resounding paean to the dictator. ( It will
take a heap of ingenuity to find hidden dissidence in that one.) Both
Russians also wrote plenty of Communist mass songs to order. Orff's
controversial cantatas, by contrast, set medieval German poetry (in
Latin and Bavarian dialect), and classical texts by Catullus, Sappho and
Euripides in the original languages, along with additional Latin lyrics
by the composer himself, a trained "humanist."
The worst Orff can be accused of is opportunism. He accepted a
1938 commission from the mayor of Frankfurt to compose incidental music
for "A Midsummer Night's Dream" to replace Mendelssohn's racially banned
score. But even here, an extenuating case can be argued. Shakespeare's
play had long attracted Orff. He had composed music for it as early as
1917, and he added more in 1927, before there was any Nazi government to curry favor with.
Shabbier than anything he did under the Nazis was his behavior
immediately after the war. An obvious beneficiary of the regime, one of
only 12 composers to receive a full military exemption from Goebbels's
propaganda ministry, Orff regaled his denazification interrogators with
half-truths and outright lies to get himself classified Gray- Acceptable
(that is, professionally employable) by the Allied military government.
The "Midsummer" score, he assured them, was not composed under
orders (true only insofar as a commission can be distinguished from an
order). "He swears that it was not written to try to replace
Mendelssohn's music," reads the official report filed by the American
officer in charge of political screenings, "and he admits that he chose
an unfortunate moment in history to write it." Orff also maintained that
"he never had any connection with prominent Nazis." the truth of such a
statement depends, of course, on definitions: of "prominent" as well as
"Nazi."
But these prevarications pale before the whopper Orff put over
on his personal hearing officer: Capt. Newell Jenkins, a musician who
had studied with Orff before the war and who later became familiar to
New York audiences as the director of Clarion Concerts, a pioneering
early-music organization. Orff convinced Jenkins that he had been a
cofounder of the White Rose resistance movement and that he had fled for
his life into the Bavarian Alps when the "other" founder, the
musicologist Kurt Huber, was exposed, arrested and executed in 1943.
Orff and Huber were well acquainted: they had
collaborated on an anthology of Bavarian folk songs. As Huber's widow
has testified, when Huber was arrested, Orff was terrified at the
prospect of guilt by association. But his claim to that very "guilt" in
retrospect has been exploded by the historian Michael H. Kater in his
recent book "Composers of the Nazi Era."
Not every recent commentator has been as scrupulous as Mr.
Kater. Alberto Fassone, the author of the Orff article in the second
edition of The New Grove Dictionary (sure to become the standard source
of information on the composer for inquiring English-speaking minds),
colludes with the composer's exculpating equivocations. Orff told his
screeners that "his music was not appreciated by the Nazis and that he
never got a favorable review by a Nazi music critic." Mr. Fassone
elaborates: "The fact that `
Carmina Burana' had been
torn to shreds by Herbert Gerigk, the influential critic of the
Völkischer Beobachter, who referred to the `incomprehensibility of the
language' colored by a `jazzy atmosphere,' caused many of Germany's
opera intendants to fear staging the work after its premiere." Case
dismissed?
Not so fast. Gerigk's paper was the main
Nazi Party
organ, to be sure, and the critic was a protégé of Alfred Rosenberg,
the Nazi ideologist. But another reviewer, Horst Büttner, a protégé of
Joseph Goebbels, waxed ecstatic after the 1937 premiere about "the
radiant, strength-filled life-joy" Orff's settings of bawdy medieval
ballads expressed through their "folklike structure." And that opinion
won out. By 1940, even the Völkischer Beobachter was on board, hailing
"Carmina Burana" as "the kind of clear, stormy and yet always
disciplined music that our time requires."
Phrases like "strength-filled life-joy," and the emphasis on
stormy discipline, do begin to smack of Nazi slogans. Through them we
can leave the composer's person behind and go back to the music, which
is all that matters now. To saddle the music with the composer's
personal shortcomings would merely be to practice another kind of guilt
by association; and in any case, Orff is dead. His works are what live
and continue to affect our lives. Even if we admit that "Carmina Burana"
was the original "Springtime for Hitler," with its theme of vernal lust
and its tunes redolent (according to a German acquaintance of mine) of
the songs sung in the 30's by Nazi youth clubs, can't weN take Hitler
away now and just leave innocent springtime or, at least, innocent
music?
Sorry, no. The innocence of music is for many an article of
faith, if often an expedient one. The German conductor Christian
Thielemann, recently embroiled in discussions over whether he really
called Daniel Barenboim's dispute with the Staatsoper in Berlin "the
Jewish mess," sought refuge in the notion. "What has C sharp minor got
to do with fascism?" he asked a British interviewer. But that is like
asking what the letter F has to do with fascism. It all depends on what
letters follow it that is, on the context. Sing the "Horst Wessel Lied"
in C sharp minor all right, that tune is in the major, but just suppose
and the key can have a lot to do with fascism.
But there are more sophisticated ways of asking the question.
The American musicologist Kim Kowalke notes that Orff first employed his
primitivistic idiom, the one now associated with his "Nazi" pieces, in
songs predating the Nazi regime, to words by the eventual Hitler refugee
Franz Werfel and by the eventual Communist poet laureate Bertolt
Brecht. Armed with this information, Mr. Kowalke seeks to challenge a
position that many, this writer included, have taken: "If the musical
idiom of `Carmina Burana' derives from settings of Brecht's poetry, can
it inherently inscribe, as Brecht would argue in general and Richard
Taruskin would assert in particular, a `celebration of Nazi youth
culture'?"
YET surely Mr. Kowalke knows that his italicized word loads the
dice. There is no inherent difference, perhaps, between music that
accompanies leftist propaganda and music that accompanies rightist
propaganda. But one may argue nevertheless that Orff's music is well
nay, obviously suited to accompany propaganda. What makes its
suitability so obvious, one may argue further, are indeed its inherent
qualities. And such music, one may conclude, can have undesirable
effects on listeners, similar to those of propaganda.
The first point that Orff's music is "obviously" suited to
accompany propaganda is corroborated by its ubiquitous employment for
such purposes even today. Not all propaganda is political, after all;
and most people who recognize Orff's music today do so because of its
exploitation in commercials for chocolate, beer and juvenile action
heroes (not to mention Michael Jackson's "Dangerous" tour). Alex Ross
has argued in The New York Times that the co-optation of "Carmina
Burana" for sales propaganda "is proof that it contains no diabolical
message, indeed that it contains no message whatsoever." But change the
word "contains" to "channels" and Orff is back on the hook. His music
can channel any diabolical message that text or context may suggest, and
no music does it better.
How does it accomplish this sinister task? That's what Orff
learned from Stravinsky, master of the pounding rhythm and the endless
ostinato. Repeat anything often enough, Dr. Goebbels said, and it
becomes the truth. Stravinsky himself has been accused of the
dehumanizing effect we now attribute to mass propaganda, most
notoriously by Theodor W. Adorno in his 1948 book, "Philosophy of New
Music." But Stravinsky's early music, though admittedly "written with an
ax" (as the composer put it to his fellow Russian exile Vladimir
Ussachevsky), is subtlety itself compared with the work of his German
imitator.
And yes, "imitator" is definitely the word. "Carmina Burana"
abounds in out-and-out plagiarisms from "Les Noces." The choral yawp
("niet-niet-niet-niet-niet!") at the end of "Circa mea pectora" (No. 18
of the 25 tiny numbers that make up Orff's 40-minute score) exactly
reproduces the choral writing at the climax of Stravinsky's third
tableau. Another little choral mantra
("trillirivos-trillirivos-trillirivos") in Orff's No. 20 ("Veni, veni,
venias") echoes the acclamations to the patron saints halfway through
the second tableau of Stravinsky's ballet. And these are only the most
blatant cases.
In "Catulli Carmina," Orff aped the distinctive
four-piano-plus-percussion scoring of "Les Noces," upping the percussion
ante from 6 players on 16 instruments to 12 on 23. Surrounding a
central episode in which the story of Catullus's doomed love for Lesbia
is danced to an accompaniment of a cappella choruses, the
piano-cum-percussion clangor accompanies torrid bust- and crotch-groping
lyrics by the composer: real "pornoph ony," to recall the epithet The
New York Sun lavished on Shostakovich's "Lady Macbeth
of the Mtsensk District" in 1935. (In the noble tradition of
Krafft-Ebing, at least half of Orff's Latin verses are left untranslated
on record jackets I've seen.)
Finally, in "Trionfo di Afrodite" Orff copied the actual
scenario of "Les Noces," a ritualized wedding ceremony, although the
music now harks back to Stravinsky's more decorous mythological period
with echoes of "Oedipus Rex" and "Perséphone," along with an unexpected
fantasy in the middle on the Shrovetide music from "Petrouchka." Even
the most seemingly original music in "Trionfo," Orff's imaginary
equivalent of the lascivious Greek "chromatic genus" (to which he sets
the bride and groom's lines), turns out to be a Stravinsky surrogate,
derived from the scale of alternating half and whole steps that
Stravinsky inherited from his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, who got it from
Liszt.
Even if one agrees with Adorno's strictures about Stravinsky,
though, one must also allow that the degree of barbarization represented
by Orff's leering rewrite so far exceeds Stravinsky's as to amount to a
difference in kind. When "Les Noces" is actually performed as a ballet,
especially in Bronislava Nijinska's original choreography, the visible
characters behave with what a contemporary folklorist called the
"profound gravity" and "cool, inevitable intention" of ritual. They
march off to the wedding bed in a kind of robots' lockstep, symbolizing
the grip of remorseless, immemorial tradition that ensures the
immortality of the race even as it diminishes individual freedom of
choice.
By contrast, the penultimate scene in "Trionfo di Afrodite," to
a text by Sappho, may be the most graphic musical description of the
sex act ever put on paper. Every sigh, moan and squeal is precisely
notated, so that despite the ostensibly recondite text in a dead
language, even the dullest member of the audience will get the
titillating point. (At
least Orff was an equal-opportunity orgiast: his bride
wails and whimpers as much as his groom, whereas in "Les Noces" the
bride, silent at the end, is just the groom's "nocturnal amusement.")
STRAVINSKY'S repetitions are offset by rhythmic irregularities
so that they elude easy memorization and remain surprising even after
many hearings. As a result, the overall mood of "Les Noces" and "The
Rite of Spring," his loudest pseudo-aboriginal scores, is grim, even
terrifying. Orff's rhythms are uniformly foursquare, his melodies
catchy, his moods ingratiating. His music provides what the Australian
musicologist Margaret King recently called "an instant tape loop for the
mind," something that, grasped fully and immediately, reverberates in
the head the way propaganda is supposed to do. As Mr. Ross put it, even
after half a century or more, Orff's music remains "as adept as
ever at rousing primitive, unreflective enthusiasm."
Is that a reason to love it or to hate it? Everybody likes to
indulge the herd instinct now and then, as Thomas Mann so chillingly
reminded us in "Mario and the Magician." It is just because we like it
that we ought to resist it. Could the Nazi Holocaust have been carried
off without expertly rousing primitive, unreflective enthusiasm in
millions? Was Orff's neo-paganism unrelated to the ideology that reigned
in his homeland when he wrote his most famous scores?
In 1937, the year in which "Carmina Burana" enjoyed its
smashing success, the National Socialists were engaged in a furious
propaganda battle with the churches of Germany, countering the Christian
message of compassion with neo-pagan worship of holy hatred. And what
could better support the Nazi claim that the Germans, precisely in their
Aryan neo-paganism, were the true heirs of Greco-Roman ("Western")
culture than Orff's animalistic settings of Greek and Latin poets?
Did Orff intend precisely this? Was he a Nazi? These questions are
ultimately immaterial. They allow the deflection of any criticism of
his work into irrelevant questions of rights: Orff's right to compose
his music, our right to perform and listen to it. Without questioning
either, one may still regard his music as toxic, whether it does its
animalizing work at Nazi rallies, in school auditoriums, at rock
concerts, in films, in the soundtracks that accompany commercials or in
Avery Fisher Hall.
Orff knew Kurt Huber, but their friendship was based on common
music interests, not politics; Orff was not a member of the White Rose.
Never a National Socialist, Orff did whatever was required to work in
peace, to keep away from politics, and to get through a dirty system as
cleanly as possible (27). After reading Kater's article, it is hard to
disagree with this assessment, or to avoid thinking it apt for many of
those "gray, ambiguous persons, ready to compromise" whom Primo Levi
identified both inside and outside the Lager.
Source
Michael H. Kater, "Carl Orff im Dritten Reich," Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 43, 1 (January 1995): 1-35.Reviewed by David B. Dennis
(originally published by H-German on 25 January 1996)
