Uncle Monty,
what moves me to take part in a discussion like this one especially regarding the Carmina Burana, is the fact that there are works of art in general, and therefore pieces of music, of which unpalatable facts are willfully or unintentionally brushed under the carpet.
The music I mentioned -variations on the Horst Wessel Lied and the Adolf Hitler Hymn- is immediately identifiable as National-socialist inspired stuff. E.g. Prokofiev's Odes (to the 30th anniversary of the October revolution, or to Stalin e.g.), are immidiately identifiable as communist-dictated (I don't think one could called them "inspired") works of art, as is the recently mentioned Khatchaturian 3rd symphony. That notion makes them basically harmless.
Wagner's music, or for that matter any other 19C openly anti-semitic composer's works, is not impregnated by those -then widely accepted and defended- ideas. What he has written (Der Jude in der Musik is an example) only testifies what a terrible person he was, not even taking in account his personal life. That is with more composers the case. Tchaikovsky has been mentioned as an example of a composer whom one never would like to meet, and I'd like to add the thouroughly bourgeois Anton von Webern or the completely (at least in his later life) unpalatable behaviour of one Ludwig van Beethoven as other examples. And I don't think Gesualdo was a pleasant person either....
With Orff, and especially the Carmina Burana and the Catulli Carmina, that is different. Here music is presented which was meant for the Nazi-German public, which was complying to the Nazi-rules (the latter even more than the CB), of a composer who all denied this and even proclaimed that he had been active in the Weisse Rose resistance movement (of which nearly all members were executed, very conveniently).
Here it is not immediately clear what the purpose of this music was, and I think it should be.
The decision to listen to the CB is ofcourse ever listener's personal decision.
But as we don't want to perform the Horst Wessel Lied variations because of the work's unpalatable Nazi-inspired-theme, one should think twice about the CB too.
As I already wrote previously: the present succes of the CB with the "masses" is a succes for the policies defended and thought through by Reichspropagandaminister Goebbels. He posthumously reaches those "masses". IMO unpalatable.
what moves me to take part in a discussion like this one especially regarding the Carmina Burana, is the fact that there are works of art in general, and therefore pieces of music, of which unpalatable facts are willfully or unintentionally brushed under the carpet.
The music I mentioned -variations on the Horst Wessel Lied and the Adolf Hitler Hymn- is immediately identifiable as National-socialist inspired stuff. E.g. Prokofiev's Odes (to the 30th anniversary of the October revolution, or to Stalin e.g.), are immidiately identifiable as communist-dictated (I don't think one could called them "inspired") works of art, as is the recently mentioned Khatchaturian 3rd symphony. That notion makes them basically harmless.
Wagner's music, or for that matter any other 19C openly anti-semitic composer's works, is not impregnated by those -then widely accepted and defended- ideas. What he has written (Der Jude in der Musik is an example) only testifies what a terrible person he was, not even taking in account his personal life. That is with more composers the case. Tchaikovsky has been mentioned as an example of a composer whom one never would like to meet, and I'd like to add the thouroughly bourgeois Anton von Webern or the completely (at least in his later life) unpalatable behaviour of one Ludwig van Beethoven as other examples. And I don't think Gesualdo was a pleasant person either....
With Orff, and especially the Carmina Burana and the Catulli Carmina, that is different. Here music is presented which was meant for the Nazi-German public, which was complying to the Nazi-rules (the latter even more than the CB), of a composer who all denied this and even proclaimed that he had been active in the Weisse Rose resistance movement (of which nearly all members were executed, very conveniently).
Here it is not immediately clear what the purpose of this music was, and I think it should be.
The decision to listen to the CB is ofcourse ever listener's personal decision.
But as we don't want to perform the Horst Wessel Lied variations because of the work's unpalatable Nazi-inspired-theme, one should think twice about the CB too.
As I already wrote previously: the present succes of the CB with the "masses" is a succes for the policies defended and thought through by Reichspropagandaminister Goebbels. He posthumously reaches those "masses". IMO unpalatable.
...
) A hundred or so of us found it a very decent challenge to learn it in one day at a drop-in-and-sing event, but it was a 'damned good sing' (IMO) once we'd got the notes, and our audience seemed to like it.
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