Press Office 21/08/2015
CARMINA BURANA
Carl Orff
Arena di Verona
Tuesday 25th August - 10 pm
On Tuesday 25th August at 10:00 pm, Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana will return for the 93rd edition of the Arena di Verona Opera Festival.
Following last year’s success, when the work resounded for the first time in the ancient walls of the Verona amphitheatre, Andrea Battistoni will once again be on the on the podium of the Arena di Verona Orchestra for this special appointment.
The key voices on the Arena’s stage will be those of Soprano Jessica Pratt, Countertenor Raffaele Pe and Baritone Mario Cassi, along with the Arena Chorus directed by Salvo Sgrò and a Double Children’s Chorus: A.LI.VE. directed by Paolo Facincani and A.d’A.MUS. directed by Marco Tonini.
Carl Orff’s best-known masterpiece will once more enrapture the Arena di Verona audience with a single performance on August 25th, thanks to its Orchestra, Chorus and soloists specialized in this genre.
The 24 poems set to music by Orff, mainly in Latin, but also including some in Old High German and one in Provençal, are taken from a collection of 11th and 12th century Medieval poems discovered in the monastery of Benediktbeuern, near Bad Tölz in Bavaria, and handed down through time thanks to an important manuscript contained in a 13th century illuminated manuscript, the Codex Latinus Monacensis 4550 or Codex Buranus: hence the title Carmina Burana, introduced in 1847 by scholar Johann Andreas Schmeller on the occasion of the manuscript’s first publication.
This was the origin of the great musical fresco of medieval poetry, which forms the first part of the theatrical trilogy Trionfi, which includes Catulli Carmina and Trionfo di Afrodite, created by Orff in the first half of the 1900s. Carmina Burana was performed for the first time in Frankfurt on 8th June 1937, whereas the first Italian performance was staged five years later, at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala, on 10th October 1942. Carl Orff attracted international acclaim precisely with Carmina Burana, so much so that the composition, whether as a staged performance or in its symphonic version, meets with on-going success to this day.
The German musician’s format of the so-called “scenic cantata”- which has the descriptive subtitle Cantiones profanae cantoribus et choris cantandae, comitantibus instrumentis atque imaginibus magicis - consists in a prologue, five parts and a finale, and does not follow a well-defined narration, but is based on the concept of the turning “Wheel of Fortune”.
In fact, after an appeal to the goddess Fortuna (Fortune), which forms the prologue (Fortuna imperatrix mundi), the first section celebrates the joys of spring (Primo vere), then passes on to meadows (Uf dem Anger) and the game of amorous encounters; the following In taberna section refers to the boisterous goliardic customs of the clerici vagantes (travelling students and clerics), while the fourth part features anthems to love (Cour d’amours) and ends with the fifth part, Blanziflor et Helena, with the chorus singing Ave formosissima to Venus. Then, in the finale, there is a reprise of the opening chorus passage dedicated to Fortune (O, Fortuna), concluding the composition in a symmetrical fashion.
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