An intelligent documentary on Orff, the Nazis, his vanity and painfully late repentance on the BBC, called 'O Fortuna'... it had a particularly striking ending, where various voices of people who had revered him or been betrayed by him spoke one after another, without comment. A sort of Olympian point of view: I liked its avoidance of simple accusations or denials – clearly this was a life layered with both incredible selfishness and also awareness, and to appreciate that without a simple reduction to one or the other was powerful. An especially remarkable coda with children who had cerebral palsy, being taught Orff-Schulwerk with patient affection by a dedicated group of teachers, emphasized the ambiguity – because of course those children would have been among the first to be 'disinfected' out of existence by the Nazis....
It did remind me of those intense Latin, Greek and medieval works of his that I haven't listened to for ages. Even parts of Carmina Burana were like old reminders – but Catulli Carmina and the Trionfo di Afrodite, the other two parts of the trilogy, have passages that still strike me incredibly deeply: they feel inevitable, powerful, even archetypal, and so familiar that I can hardly believe that it's probably twenty-five or thirty years since I've last heard them. (There are so many there's no point in mentioning each one – but, for instance, the eerie 'Ju-cun-dum' on a single note, repeated with shifting rhythms like a sensual incantation, is utterly memorable.
I'd also forgotten how magnificent the penultimate cadence of good ol' Carmina Burana is, with its hugely ecstatic, glittering paean to Aphrodite, which after a split second falls such a distance to land in the merciless recap of 'O Fortuna'. I can imagine coaching the chorus not to move, not to turn the page early, not to anticipate the change – if they can be sensually, transcendently joyful in that cadence, the fall would reflect the inhuman vastness of the universe that underlies the whole work.)
Some years after I'd heard those works, probably in my late twenties, I also bought the DGG recording of his final work, the 'play for the end of time'. Although a lot of the work is for spoken chorus, reflecting Greek traditions, you never forget that spectral final quartet – four viols senza vibrato, playing a directionless counterpoint that eventually evaporates into nothingness. The narrator in the documentary treated it as a gesture of abnegation/acceptance, of Orff unable to really resolve his life, but showing that he was aware of the mistakes and contradictions; if the work falls into an abyss of eternity, of time and space so vast that anything merely human vanishes into it, perhaps that's a kind of forgiveness, or at least a sense of the triviality of life's triumphs and errors.
I'm not absolutely sure that's what this is, though such an interpretation makes sense; it is an interesting reflection on central problems of the Nazis, of Heidegger, and even of Jungian ideas (at least when they are, in my view and the views of most Jungians, misused) – the concern that too much interest in the infinite or the archetypal leaves one open to powerfully charged judgments, where the vastly inhuman becomes attractive through its sheer power....
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