On Tuesday, December 23, 2008 at 5:31:18 PM UTC-8, Premise Checker wrote:

Carl Orff, the composer who lived a monstrous lie http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article5366154.ece
[Thanks to Sarah for this.]
December 19, 2008
The creator of Carmina Burana hid an ugly secret about his betrayal of a friend under the Third Reich
Richard Morrison
The opening line of Carmina Burana - "O Fortuna!" - could hardly be
more apt. Few composers felt themselves more at the mercy of
capricious gods and twists of fate than its composer, Carl Orff. He
was never a diehard Nazi; indeed, he looked with disdain on their
oafish cultural values. Far from espousing the hounding of "inferior
races", he was fascinated by jazz and by what today we would call
world music. Yet he rose to become one of the Third Reich's top
musicians.
According to one of his four wives, he "found it impossible to love"
and "despised people". Yet in Carmina Burana he created the world's
jolliest musical celebration of boozing, feasting and generally
enjoying the sins of other people's flesh.
He turned his back on his own teenage daughter, who adored him. "He
didn't want me in his married life," she recalls sadly. Yet he was
(and, in some quarters, still is) adulated in educational circles
for his Schulwerksystem of teaching music to young children through
rhythm and gesture--a system he originally intended to flog to the
Hitler Youth movement. It is still used around the world,
particularly (and paradoxically) to help children with cerebral
palsy, who would probably not be alive if Hitler's Germany had
triumphed.
A connoisseur of Greek drama, and a perceptive scholar who edited
and performed Monteverdi long before the rest of the world
rediscovered the Baroque genius, he talked eloquently about the need
for people to express themselves through art if they were to become "complete" human beings. Yet one of his wives says that he himself
was full of "demonic forces" and would "wake up screaming at night".
He used people shamelessly. Yet, as another wife puts it, "all his
life he wanted forgiveness" for the guilt that consumed him. He was
obsessed by the myth of Orpheus, the musician who descended into the Underworld. "Just like Orff himself," his biographer notes.
All this, and an act of treachery hidden until now, is revealed in
an exceptional film by Tony Palmer, fittingly called O Fortuna,
that's just out on DVD and will be broadcast on Sky Arts 2 in late
January. The timing is perfect. Next month, a spectacular touring
production of Carmina Burana rolls up at the O venue in the former
Millennium Dome. For the past four decades this bawdy oratorio has
been performed somewhere in the world every day of every year. But
this show is likely to eclipse all previous stagings. Besides a
chorus and orchestra of 250, it has fireworks, giant puppets, cannon
effects, and, according to its producer, Franz Abraham, "erotic
scenes with naked girls imitating an orgy".
For once it can be truthfully said that the composer would have
loved it. And the show, which has already played to a million people
on its 13-year global journey, is expected to attract huge audiences
- upwards of 10,000 on each of its two nights.
I doubt whether many of those 20,000 punters, innocently enjoying
this tub-thumping, thigh-slapping medley of pulsating choral numbers
(based, incongruously, on a collection of poems by 13th-century
monks, discovered in a monastery in Orff's beloved Bavaria) will be
aware that the piece had its premiere, in 1937, at a Nazi Party
gathering. Nor that its creator had a dark secret that Palmer's film highlights for the first time.
Orff had a friend called Kurt Huber, an academic who had helped him
with librettos. Huber was also a brave man. During the war he
founded the Munich unit of Die Weisse Rose (The White Rose), the
German resistance movement. In February 1943 he and other Resistance
members were arrested by the Gestapo, tortured and publicly hanged.
Orff happened to call at Huber's house the day after his arrest.
Huber's wife (whom Palmer tracked down for his film) begged Orff to
use his influence to help her husband. But Orff's only thought was
for his own position. If his friendship with Huber came out, he told
her, he would be "ruined". Huber's wife never saw Orff again.
Two years later, after Germany's surrender, Orff himself was
interrogated--by an American intelligence officer who had to
establish whether Orff could be "denazi-fied". That would allow Orff
(among other things) to collect the massive royalties from Carmina
Burana. The American asked Orff if he could think of a single thing
he had done to stand up to Hitler, or to distance himself from the
policies of the Third Reich? Orff had done nothing of that kind. So
he made up a brazen lie. Knowing that anyone who might contradict
him was likely to be dead, he told Jenkins that he had co-founded
Die Weisse Rose with his friend, Kurt Huber. He was believed--or at
least, not sufficiently disbelieved to have his denazification
delayed.
And then, as Palmer's film reveals, Orff did the most astonishing
thing. He sat down and wrote a fictitious letter to his dead friend,
in effect apologising for his behaviour. He craved Huber's
forgiveness--even, it seems, from beyond the grave.
In my mind Orff's tangled career raises two fundamental questions.
The first is, how would we have behaved in his circumstances? Before
the Nazis endorsed Carmina Burana, he had been penniless. He was
seduced by the rank and riches he suddenly acquired--far too
seduced to bite the thuggish hands that fed him. And unlike many
other German geniuses, he loved Bavaria too much to think of
emigrating (even though, with a Jewish grandparent, he was taking a
colossal risk of being exposed by staying).
So he acquiesced. He even wrote new incidental music to
Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, so that the famous score by
the Jewish composer Mendelssohn could be banished. Then, at the end
of the war, he panicked and told a dreadful lie to get himself off
the hook. From the comfortable perspective of 60 years' distance,
it's easy to damn his cowardice and self-preserving mendacity. But
millions behave with equal spinelessness in offices round the world
every day, when the only danger is losing a coveted promotion or
having to shoulder responsibility for some cockup.
The second question is, should any of this affect our appreciation
of Carmina Burana, with its proto-minimalist rhythmic energy and its
alluring exhortation for us to eat, drink, fornicate and be merry,
because tomorrow we die?
After all, if we disqualified from our approval all art commissioned
by montrous regimes or nasty patrons, or created by appalling
people, there would be very few Old Masters in our galleries, and no
Wagner in our opera houses.
"The fact that the Nazis liked Orff's music is not in itelf proof
that Orff was a Nazi, or approved of their methods," Abraham says.
"He simply lived in that generation of Germans when, unfortunately,
everybody had a connection of some sort with the Nazis. Even the
so-called good guys. Look at Günter Grass. Two years ago he shocked
everyone by revealing that he was in the SS." At least one gets the
feeling that Orff, waking up screaming in the night, knew exactly
how badly he had behaved.
The final irony in his twisted and compromised life? When he died in
1982 this most unsaintly of men ended up, as he wished, buried in a monastery--just like the scurrilous medieval poems that brought him
such fame.
O Fortuna is available on DVD at www.voiceprint.co.uk or www.tonypalmerdvd.com.Carmina Burana is at the O2 Arena, London SE10
(www. theO2.co.uk; 0844 8560202), on Jan 17, 18

https://countercurrents.org/2023/03/adolf-hitler-carl-orff-sophie-scholl/

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