Carmina burana composer full#
Carmina burana composer trial#

Carmina burana composer trial#

This led to his arrest by the Gestapo in February 1943, after which he was tortured, given a show trial and executed. Indeed, Huber was a founder of the White Rose resistance movement. Huber, however, was an anti-Nazi oppositionist, unlike Orff. In his home town of Munich, Orff had long been a close friend of the Swiss-born academic Kurt Huber, who had helped him with his librettos for Carmina Burana and other works. But he prospered under National Socialist rule and he had a particular ugly secret of his own from the Nazi period, which Palmer's research has brought into the light.

Watching clips of Orff in Palmer's film, it is tempting to see him as a recognisable type of postwar German, a man carrying his part of a shared trauma about which he preferred to remain silent.

Carmina burana composer full#

Mid-20th-century Germany was unusually full of adults who wanted to forget their own and their society's failings during the Nazi years. The composer sought to avoid personal and moral responsibility in most things, and then wished to be forgiven for his failure to accept these responsibilities. 'He had his life and that was that,' she tells Palmer. He could not sustain adult relationships - including with a daughter whom he rejected. He thought first and mainly about himself.

The film, which takes its title from the opening phrase of Carmina Burana, makes it clear that Orff had the psychology of a permanent adolescent. The Nazi newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, once pointed to Orff's cantata as 'the kind of clear, stormy, and yet always disciplined music that our time requires'.īut, as Tony Palmer's new film about Orff, O Fortuna, establishes, there is another thing we ought to know about the composer as well. After some initial official discomfort about the work's frank sexual innuendos, Orff's cantata was elevated to the status of a signature piece in Nazi circles, where it was treated as an emblem of Third Reich 'youth culture'. But Carmina Burana also made Orff's name in Nazi cultural circles. Orff was so clear about the work's pivotal importance in his output that he later disowned almost everything he had written before it. It was the first performance of Carmina Burana in Frankfurt in 1937 that established the Bavarian, then 41, as a major musical figure.