Carl Orff wrote Carmina Burana and also reshaped how children learn music
Most people know Carl Orff through one thunderous chorus. The Munich composer finished Carmina Burana in 1936 and felt it was the first time he had written exactly what he wanted. Yet his longer legacy may be the Schulwerk, a way of teaching children music as naturally as a new language.
Orff was born in Munich on 10 July 1895 into a Bavarian military family, though he later insisted there was more music-making than drilling at home. His father was an officer and keen amateur musician, his mother a trained pianist. He started piano at five, heard his first opera, The Flying Dutchman, in 1909, and was in the audience for the world premiere of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde in 1911. His choice to study at the Munich Academy of Music rather than finish school caused a family row, and he found the academy stuffy.
The First World War nearly finished him. Called up in 1917, he was almost killed that autumn when a trench collapsed, leaving him with memory loss, speech problems and paralysis down his left side. For a time even hearing music made him ill. His daughter later believed the ordeal made him more rebellious as an artist.
In the 1920s he developed the idea of elemental music, uniting sound, dance, poetry and gesture, and drew more from Stravinsky's earthy Les noces than from neoclassical polish. In 1924 he and Dorothee Günther founded a Munich school for gymnastics, music and dance, where constant work with beginners shaped the Schulwerk. With colleagues such as Gunild Keetman he built it around simple instruments and specially composed pieces. His staging of Monteverdi's Orfeo drew ridicule from the Munich press.
His career under the Third Reich remains debated. Never a Nazi Party member, he wrote music for the opening of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, was commissioned to replace Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream score, and drew a monthly salary from Vienna from 1941 to 1945. In 1944 Hitler's list of protected artists exempted him from service. He hid his part-Jewish ancestry all his life. After denazification he was cleared to work and kept composing until his death in 1982.
Source: Carl Orff
