Carl Orff

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Carl Orff (1956)
Carl Orff around 1970

Carl Orff (born July 10, 1895 in Munich ; † March 29, 1982 ibid) was a German composer and music teacher . His best-known work is the scenic cantata Carmina Burana , which became one of the most popular choral works of the 20th century.

Life

Carl Orff, born in 1895 at Maillingerstraße 16 (today: house no. 30) in the Neuhausen district of Munich , was the son of the professional officer Heinrich Orff and received piano , cello and organ lessons from 1900 . His first composition was also published that year. He gained early experience in making music in a group as a student at the Wittelsbacher Gymnasium , where he accompanied the school orchestra on the organ, piano or harmonium and took over solo parts as soprano in the school choir. He also sang in the church choir on Sundays and at home, accompanied by his mother on the piano, opera parts based on piano reductions. At the age of 14, after visiting the opera Der Fliegende Holländer by Richard Wagner, he was so excited for days that he soon had to visit it again with a piano reduction in order to be approachable again.

After Carl Orff had set poems by Hölderlin and Heine to music for voice and piano in 1911 , he studied from 1913 to 1914 at the Royal Academy of Music in Munich and also devoted himself to music education. After a short military service in 1917/18 he was Kapellmeister in Munich, Mannheim and Darmstadt until 1919 . Orff studied with Heinrich Kaminski in Munich in 1921 and 1922 . In 1924, together with Dorothee Günther , he founded the "Günther School Munich - Training Center of the Federation for Free and Applied Movement e. V. ”, which trained in the areas of gymnastics, rhythm, music and dance. Carl Orff himself took over the management of the music department there. The basis of his work was the idea of ​​developing the musical-rhythmic feeling out of movement. From this idea he and his colleague Gunild Keetman developed a new model for music and movement education: the Orff-Schulwerk . The first publications on this were made between 1930 and 1934.

Relationship to the Nazi state

Carl Orff's behavior in the time of National Socialism has come under increasing discussion in recent years, especially through the publications of the Canadian historian Michael H. Kater . The result is the image of an apolitical composer who was also not interested in politics, who nevertheless knew how to come to terms with those in power in order to be able to pursue his artistic path unhindered, and who enjoyed being courted as an important German composer of his time .

Orff accepted two orders from the rulers: His entry and dance of the children was performed for the opening of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. On behalf of the City of Frankfurt, he revised his stage work for Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1939 , the first version of which was published in 1917 and which was now to serve as a replacement for the Midsummer Night's Dream music by the ostracized Jewish composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy . In 1944, in the final phase of the Second World War, Orff was named by Hitler on the " Gottbegnadeten-list ", whereby he was exempted from the Wehrmacht and labor on the home front , not least because of the "German cultural heritage", which from the point of view of the rulers was absolutely worth protecting. .

Orff was a personal friend of Kurt Huber , one of the founders of the “ White Rose ” resistance group, who was executed in 1943 for resisting the Nazi regime. After the end of National Socialism, Orff is said to have tried to take advantage of this friendship retrospectively by claiming to the denazification commission, according to Michael Kater, that he himself was a member of the "White Rose", which was not the case. There is, however, no evidence for this claim in the files of the denazification proceedings, which the Viennese historian Oliver Rathkolb regards as a refutation of Kater's thesis. After consulting his assigned American officer and former student, Newell Jenkins, Orff was classified as a follower. He was allowed to practice his profession again. In an interview with Michael Kater on March 3, 1993, Jenkins said that Orff claimed to have founded a youth group with Huber (they had "founded some kind of youth group" together) .

further activities

For the Olympic Games of Berlin 1936, he composed the piece feeder and dancing children . He repeated this at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich . Here he composed the greeting of the youth . With Gunild Keetman he edited five volumes of music for children from 1950 to 1954 (new version of the Orff school work). The children should also find themselves through musical education. His teachings are also used in curative education to this day.

His best known work was the Carmina Burana , a piece of music that set 24 texts from the medieval manuscript Carmina Burana to music . He also used literary models (in particular by Aeschylus , Catullus , Friedrich Hölderlin and the Brothers Grimm ) for other works.

In addition to his compositional work, he also took on management positions in various musical institutions. From 1950 to 1960 he was the head of a master class at the Musikhochschule in Munich. In 1961 he was head of the Orff Institute in Salzburg . From 1962 Wilhelm Keller was its director; Together with the Dutch musician and music teacher Pierre van Hauwe , he is one of the greatest supporters of Orff's school work in Europe.

Private life

Carl Orff was married four times, from 1920 to 1927 with Alice Solscher, from 1939 to 1953 in his second marriage with the music therapist Gertrud Willert , from 1954 to 1959 in his third marriage with the writer and teacher Luise Rinser and from 1960 in his fourth marriage Liselotte Schmitz (1930–2012). Orff had a daughter from his first marriage, the actress Godela Büchtemann-Orff (1921-2013).

Carl Orff's grave in the "Sorrowful Chapel" of the Andechs monastery church with a wall panel and floor slab

Orff died after a long illness on March 29, 1982 in Munich. The funeral service led by Abbot Odilo Lechner took place on April 2nd in the Theatinerkirche , the musical framework was Mozart's Requiem . On April 3, Orff was buried in close family and friends in the "Sorrowful Chapel" of the Andechs monastery church, according to his wishes . This is an unusual honor for a non-noble and non-cleric. His ashes are under a plate with his name and a cross on it. The inscription on the plaque above the grave reads “Summus finis” ( Latin for “the highest goal”).

Works

Stage works

Other works

  • Orff-Schulwerk : Music for Children (together with Gunild Keetman; 1930–1935, new version 1950–1954)
  • Cantatas
    • Three cantatas based on Franz Werfel (1929/30, new version 1968)
    • Two cantatas after Bertolt Brecht (1930/31, new version 1973/1968)
  • Edits
    • Lamenti after Claudio Monteverdi :
      • Orpheus (1924; revised 1939)
      • Ariadne's Lament (1925, revised 1940)
      • Dance of the Brittle (1925, revised 1940)
    • Entrata for orchestra, based on "The Bells" by William Byrd (1928, revised 1941)
  • The Christmas story (1948), text by Carl Orff, music by Gunild Keetman

Honors (selection)

Wall plaque at the grave of Carl Orff in Andechs
Carl Orff Medal, with its very unusual shape for coinage.
German special postage stamp 1995

In the Upper Bavarian town of Dießen am Ammersee ( Landsberg am Lech district ), where he lived in the Sankt Georgen district from 1955, the Carl Orff Museum has been remembering him since 1991. The community has awarded the Carl Orff Prize since 2009 .

Numerous public traffic areas and schools were named after him. B. a primary school in Landshut (1971), the secondary school in Bad Dürkheim (1976) and the grammar school in Unterschleißheim (since April 28, 1982).

The Andechs Carl Orff Festival took place in the Andechs Monastery from 1998 to 2015 in the summer months .

The "Association of Bavarian Singing and Music Schools" named the medal created in 1980 for people and institutions who have made outstanding contributions after Carl Orff.

On July 10, 1990, the composer's 95th birthday, the opening ceremony of the Orff Center in Munich by the Bavarian State Minister for Education and Culture, Science and Art, Dr. . hc Hans Zehetmair, as well as Ms. Liselotte Orff and the Carl Orff Foundation. On the occasion of the opening, the press headlined “A house for music” and “The students should do research here”.

After-effects and reception

Orff Center Munich
  • From the late 1930s, Gerhard Lenssen became his student. With his one-man theater he realized Orff plays such as Die Kluge , Der Mond and Antigonae - based on Dresden.
  • In the mid-1960s, director Stanley Kubrick Orff tried to win over his new feature film project in 2001 as a film composer, because he particularly liked his Carmina Burana . Orff declined because of his age.
  • In 1973, the then unknown director Terrence Malick chose a piece from Orff's school work as the main and final music for his first feature film Badlands - Zerschossene Träume : Musica Poetica / Gassenhauer from 4 pieces for xylophone . The soft and harmonious xylophone sounds stand in contrast to the blood trail that the two main actors Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek draw on their way through the Badlands .
  • In 1975 Jean-Pierre Ponnelle realized the television film Carmina Burana for ZDF . The scenes of the cantata were implemented here one to one in places. So there is a swan who mourns his fate when fried. The idea of ​​the eternal cycle is embodied in a huge wheel of return .
  • 1981 - The film Excalibur uses the rhythmic choir singing O Fortuna from Orff's Carmina Burana , when the knights go into decisive battle at the climax of the film. Contemporary film composers are now consciously borrowing from Orff and using this style in other films.
  • The Carl Orff Ensemble existed in Hanover from 1983 to 2013 .
  • In Munich, the Carl-Orff-Bogen and the Carl-Orff-Bogen-Park were named after him.
  • 1993 - The German film composer Hans Zimmer uses the theme from Musica Poetica again for the film True Romance . It pays homage to the film Badlands made 20 years earlier - as does the music.
  • 2000 - In Forrester - Found! One of the key scenes of the film is deposited with the xylophone sounds from Musica Poetica : You see the author, who suffers from a public phobia, overcome his fear and cycle through New York on a bicycle.
  • 2018 - Against the backdrop of the Forbidden City in Beijing, China, a performance of Carmina Burana with the Wiener Singakademie is recorded by 3sat .

student

See also

literature

Web links

Commons : Carl Orff  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Commemorative plaque Carl Orff , Stadtportal München, accessed on October 26, 2017.
  2. ^ Christian Lankes, Wolfram Funk : Munich as a garrison in the 19th century: the capital and residence city as the location of the Bavarian army of Elector Max IV Joseph until the turn of the century. Mittler, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-8132-0401-4 , p. 503 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  3. ↑ Ulrich Rühle: The youth of great composers: How they became what they were. dtv junior, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-423-70011-4 .
  4. ↑ Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv IV , war log roll No. 13657 (1st field artillery regiment / II. Replacement department)
  5. ^ Michael H. Kater: Composers under National Socialism: eight portraits. Parthas, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-936324-12-3 .
  6. ↑ Michael H. Kater: Carl Orff in the Third Reich. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte. Issue 1, 1995, pp. 1-35.
  7. ^ Ernst Klee : The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 443.
  8. ↑ Was Orff a member of the "White Rose"? Klassik.com, February 11, 1999.
  9. ↑ Quarterly Books for Contemporary History , Issue 1, 1995, pp. 1–35.
  10. ↑ Compilation of the life data by the Carl Orff Foundation .
  11. ↑ Orff-Schulwerk-Informations , Issue No. 29, May 1982 (PDF; 3.7 MB) accessed January 11, 2013.
  12. ↑ Weimar National Theater. In three classes . In: Der Spiegel . No. 36 , 1949, pp. 12 ( online ).
  13. ^ Carl Orff: life data. Retrieved June 3, 2018 .
  14. ^ Homepage of the Dießen Carl Orff Museum
  15. ^ The Carl Orff Medal of the Association of Bavarian Singing and Music Schools e. V. with awards since 1980
  16. ^ Orff Center Munich
  17. ↑ Hans Böhm: A great memory / To the death of Gerhard Lenssen . In: Dresdner Latest News . January 26, 1992, p. 15 .
personal data
SURNAME Orff, Carl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German composer and music teacher
DATE OF BIRTH July 10, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH March 29, 1982
Place of death Munich