Carl Orff, a music born out of nazi-ism

the piece...Carmina Burana is very famous

clipped from www.opendemocracy.net Carl Orff (1895-1982) must be counted one of the most successful of twentieth- century composers. Carmina Burana is performed every day Those four triumphant chords followed by a whispered chant and its chugging accompaniment In spite of Orff’s success histories of music seldom make more than a nod in his direction. no discussion of his music lasts long before someone calls him “a Nazi composer” The women in his life speak, without bitterness, of a man who was more at home in the “dark world” of Greek tragedy Orff may have despised the Nazis for their lack of aesthetic sensibility (!), as his biographer puts it, but he prospered under the Third Reich. He was no ideologue, merely an opportunist, Carmina Burana was a great success with the Nazis, but is it Nazi music? “O, Fortuna!” certainly generates an atmosphere of mass excitement, Carmina Burana itself is supposed to be accompanied by “magic pictures”, Orff was fascinated by puppets