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Wednesday, November 4, 2009, at 7 pm
* Fabio Mechetti, conductor
ART WALK PREVIEW - CARMINA BURANA OPEN REHEARSAL
During the First Wednesday Downtown Art Walk. Catch an exciting behind-the-scenes experience and watch an open rehearsal of Carl Orff's powerful Carmina Burana.
Admission is Free.
Jacoby Symphony Hall - Times-Union Center
Stacey Tappan, soprano
Christopher Pfund, tenor
Leon Williams, baritone
Jacksonville Symphony Chorus
Jacksonville Children’s Chorus
Carl Orff
born: 1895, Munich; died: 1982, Munich.
QuoteCarmina Burana (“Songs of Beurenâ€)
Composed in 1935-1936.
Premiered in Frankfurt on December 8, 1937
About thirty miles south of Munich, in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, is the abbey of Benediktbeuren. In 1803, a 13th-century codex was discovered among its holdings that contains some 200 secular poems which give a vivid, earthy portrait of Medieval life. Many of these poems, attacking the defects of the Church, satirizing contemporary manners and morals, criticizing the omnipotence of money, and praising the sensual joys of food, drink and physical love, were written by an amorphous band known as “Goliards.â€
These wandering scholars and ecclesiastics, who were often esteemed teachers and recipients of courtly patronage, filled their worldly verses with images of self-indulgence that were probably as much literary convention as biographical fact. The language they used was a heady mixture of Latin, old German and old French. Some paleographic musical notation appended to a few of the poems indicates that they were sung, but it is today so obscure as to be indecipherable. This manuscript was published in 1847 by Johann Andreas Schmeller under the title, Carmina Burana (“Songs of Beurenâ€), “carmina†being the plural of the Latin word for song, “carmen.â€
Carl Orff encountered these lusty lyrics for the first time in the 1930s, and he was immediately struck by their theatrical potential. Like Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson in the United States, Orff at that time was searching for a simpler, more direct musical expression that could immediately affect listeners. Orff’s view, however, was more Teutonically philosophical than that of the Americans, who were seeking a music for the common man, one related to the everyday world. Orff sought to create a musical idiom that would serve as a means of drawing listeners away from their daily experiences and closer to the realization of oneness with the universe.