On Tuesday, December 23, 2008 at 5:31:18 PM UTC-8, Premise Checker wrote:
> Carl Orff, the composer who lived a monstrous lie
> http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article5366154.ece
> [Thanks to Sarah for this.]
> December 19, 2008
> The creator of Carmina Burana hid an ugly secret about his betrayal of a
> friend under the Third Reich
> Richard Morrison
> The opening line of Carmina Burana - "O Fortuna!" - could hardly be
> more apt. Few composers felt themselves more at the mercy of
> capricious gods and twists of fate than its composer, Carl Orff. He
> was never a diehard Nazi; indeed, he looked with disdain on their
> oafish cultural values. Far from espousing the hounding of "inferior
> races", he was fascinated by jazz and by what today we would call
> world music. Yet he rose to become one of the Third Reich's top
> musicians.
> According to one of his four wives, he "found it impossible to love"
> and "despised people". Yet in Carmina Burana he created the world's
> jolliest musical celebration of boozing, feasting and generally
> enjoying the sins of other people's flesh.
> He turned his back on his own teenage daughter, who adored him. "He
> didn't want me in his married life," she recalls sadly. Yet he was
> (and, in some quarters, still is) adulated in educational circles
> for his Schulwerksystem of teaching music to young children through
> rhythm and gesture--a system he originally intended to flog to the
> Hitler Youth movement. It is still used around the world,
> particularly (and paradoxically) to help children with cerebral
> palsy, who would probably not be alive if Hitler's Germany had
> triumphed.
> A connoisseur of Greek drama, and a perceptive scholar who edited
> and performed Monteverdi long before the rest of the world
> rediscovered the Baroque genius, he talked eloquently about the need
> for people to express themselves through art if they were to become
> "complete" human beings. Yet one of his wives says that he himself
> was full of "demonic forces" and would "wake up screaming at night".
> He used people shamelessly. Yet, as another wife puts it, "all his
> life he wanted forgiveness" for the guilt that consumed him. He was
> obsessed by the myth of Orpheus, the musician who descended into the
> Underworld. "Just like Orff himself," his biographer notes.
> All this, and an act of treachery hidden until now, is revealed in
> an exceptional film by Tony Palmer, fittingly called O Fortuna,
> that's just out on DVD and will be broadcast on Sky Arts 2 in late
> January. The timing is perfect. Next month, a spectacular touring
> production of Carmina Burana rolls up at the O venue in the former
> Millennium Dome. For the past four decades this bawdy oratorio has
> been performed somewhere in the world every day of every year. But
> this show is likely to eclipse all previous stagings. Besides a
> chorus and orchestra of 250, it has fireworks, giant puppets, cannon
> effects, and, according to its producer, Franz Abraham, "erotic
> scenes with naked girls imitating an orgy".
> For once it can be truthfully said that the composer would have
> loved it. And the show, which has already played to a million people
> on its 13-year global journey, is expected to attract huge audiences
> - upwards of 10,000 on each of its two nights.
> I doubt whether many of those 20,000 punters, innocently enjoying
> this tub-thumping, thigh-slapping medley of pulsating choral numbers
> (based, incongruously, on a collection of poems by 13th-century
> monks, discovered in a monastery in Orff's beloved Bavaria) will be
> aware that the piece had its premiere, in 1937, at a Nazi Party
> gathering. Nor that its creator had a dark secret that Palmer's film
> highlights for the first time.
> Orff had a friend called Kurt Huber, an academic who had helped him
> with librettos. Huber was also a brave man. During the war he
> founded the Munich unit of Die Weisse Rose (The White Rose), the
> German resistance movement. In February 1943 he and other Resistance
> members were arrested by the Gestapo, tortured and publicly hanged.
> Orff happened to call at Huber's house the day after his arrest.
> Huber's wife (whom Palmer tracked down for his film) begged Orff to
> use his influence to help her husband. But Orff's only thought was
> for his own position. If his friendship with Huber came out, he told
> her, he would be "ruined". Huber's wife never saw Orff again.
> Two years later, after Germany's surrender, Orff himself was
> interrogated--by an American intelligence officer who had to
> establish whether Orff could be "denazi-fied". That would allow Orff
> (among other things) to collect the massive royalties from Carmina
> Burana. The American asked Orff if he could think of a single thing
> he had done to stand up to Hitler, or to distance himself from the
> policies of the Third Reich? Orff had done nothing of that kind. So
> he made up a brazen lie. Knowing that anyone who might contradict
> him was likely to be dead, he told Jenkins that he had co-founded
> Die Weisse Rose with his friend, Kurt Huber. He was believed--or at
> least, not sufficiently disbelieved to have his denazification
> delayed.
> And then, as Palmer's film reveals, Orff did the most astonishing
> thing. He sat down and wrote a fictitious letter to his dead friend,
> in effect apologising for his behaviour. He craved Huber's
> forgiveness--even, it seems, from beyond the grave.
> In my mind Orff's tangled career raises two fundamental questions.
> The first is, how would we have behaved in his circumstances? Before
> the Nazis endorsed Carmina Burana, he had been penniless. He was
> seduced by the rank and riches he suddenly acquired--far too
> seduced to bite the thuggish hands that fed him. And unlike many
> other German geniuses, he loved Bavaria too much to think of
> emigrating (even though, with a Jewish grandparent, he was taking a
> colossal risk of being exposed by staying).
> So he acquiesced. He even wrote new incidental music to
> Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, so that the famous score by
> the Jewish composer Mendelssohn could be banished. Then, at the end
> of the war, he panicked and told a dreadful lie to get himself off
> the hook. From the comfortable perspective of 60 years' distance,
> it's easy to damn his cowardice and self-preserving mendacity. But
> millions behave with equal spinelessness in offices round the world
> every day, when the only danger is losing a coveted promotion or
> having to shoulder responsibility for some cockup.
> The second question is, should any of this affect our appreciation
> of Carmina Burana, with its proto-minimalist rhythmic energy and its
> alluring exhortation for us to eat, drink, fornicate and be merry,
> because tomorrow we die?
> After all, if we disqualified from our approval all art commissioned
> by montrous regimes or nasty patrons, or created by appalling
> people, there would be very few Old Masters in our galleries, and no
> Wagner in our opera houses.
> "The fact that the Nazis liked Orff's music is not in itelf proof
> that Orff was a Nazi, or approved of their methods," Abraham says.
> "He simply lived in that generation of Germans when, unfortunately,
> everybody had a connection of some sort with the Nazis. Even the
> so-called good guys. Look at Günter Grass. Two years ago he shocked
> everyone by revealing that he was in the SS." At least one gets the
> feeling that Orff, waking up screaming in the night, knew exactly
> how badly he had behaved.
> The final irony in his twisted and compromised life? When he died in
> 1982 this most unsaintly of men ended up, as he wished, buried in a
> monastery--just like the scurrilous medieval poems that brought him
> such fame.
> O Fortuna is available on DVD at www.voiceprint.co.uk or
> www.tonypalmerdvd.com.Carmina Burana is at the O2 Arena, London SE10
> (www. theO2.co.uk; 0844 8560202), on Jan 17, 18

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