CARL ORFF
Classical music is often thought of, by people indifferent to music or fond only of pop music, as an acquired taste to which only unashamed highbrows are prone. This view, though tinged with reverse snobbery, is justified — or partly so. For while it is true that opera singers in Italy, especially tenors, command a popularity otherwise given to soccer players, it is also true that symphony concerts and chamber recitals are usually attended only by the sophisticated, and simpler tastes are catered to by undemanding and ephemeral ditties. This does not mean that there are two worlds, musically, which never meet, divided by an unbridgeable gulf: Glenn Gould, for instance, had a surprising but genuine enthusiasm for the songs of Petula Clark; and George Gershwin, with a dream of being a serious composer, went to Paris to study with Ravel. However, the Bach public is largely deaf to the appeal of Bacharach, and vice versa.
Given that this is so, it is an odd thing when a classical work achieves great popularity in both worlds. Sometimes this happens when a piece rides into favour on the coat-tails of another medium: Mozart’s piano concerto number 21, K 417, for example, was used effectively as incidental music in the movie “Elvira Madigan”; and movie-goers afterwards, who would not usually go to a symphony concert, bought recordings of it by the thousand. That, so to speak, was a case of sneaking a classical hit in by the back door. Yet it does sometimes happen that a classical piece becomes a best-seller entirely on its own merits. The reasons are not always easy to fathom, nor are such successes predictable. But the phenomenon does occur.
Three cases, within living memory, come to mind. Antonio Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons”, Henryk Górecki’s “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”, and Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana”. These works have little in common except their unexpected conquest of the market-place. They offer no recipe for adulation. Each is a freak winner, with its own separate cachet.
The four violin concertos in the Vivaldi score are a Baroque version of what is now called Easy Listening. That is, they make no demands on a listener like those involved in listening to the Beethoven or the Brahms, let alone the Berg. They are flashy and tuneful but, more than that, they are picturesque: they portray weather in recognizable ways; and weather is something all people are exposed to, whether or not they expose themselves normally to Mendelssohn or Tchaikovsky. Why this particular piece of sound-painting should have caught on with the general public, rather than Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”, is inexplicable. But once such a fad sets in, it snowballs. Advertising has little to do with it: word-of-mouth carries the news from one individual to another, on a multiplicatory scale, and people jump on board to be part of what is now a fashion. The encouraging thing is that many of those who bought the Vivaldi recording found they really liked it; and some of them then moved on to other classical repertoire.
In the case of “The Four Seasons”, the musical idiom was straightforward, digestible, and attractive at first hearing. By contrast, most contemporary music is in an unfamiliar idiom that often repels listeners to whom music means just traditional harmony and tunes they can come away humming. So everyone was surprised when Górecki’s “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs” became an overnight sensation. It was not as though the composer dumbed down his idiom for the sake of mass appeal. His language is uncompromisingly modern, and no other works of his have enjoyed the same acceptance outside the narrow boundaries of minority taste — dissonant harmonies and jagged lines seldom entrance the uninitiated. Somehow, the Górecki score found its way into thousands of hearts. This may have had something to do with the attractiveness of the recorded performance and the visceral beauty of the soprano soloist’s voice — most people’s contact with the work was through disc, not through attendance at a concert. That, though, does not fully explain how it worked such widespread magic. Yet the fact is it communicated deeply, almost despite its idiom. Perhaps that had something to do with its emotional content, for we have lived through tragic times, and the “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs” does capture the sadness of the age in an expressive way. None the less, it is a unique case of modernism breaking the musical equivalent of the sound-barrier.
The same cannot be said of the even more popular “Carmina Burana” by Carl Orff. Here was a work for symphony orchestra, choir, and soloists, written in 1937, that won millions of fans by whom such fare is customarily ignored. It was by a composer unknown outside Germany, and it even had another strike going against it by having a text in Latin. All the same, it leapt suddenly to the top of the charts in the early nineteen-fifties, and it is still regularly programmed in concert-halls and on radio. In this case, the reason is obvious: the work has enormous rhythmic energy, the harmonic vocabulary is undaunting, and the scoring is brazenly sensational; overall, the effect is of a primitive, almost barbaric, sensuality, and it touches on the nerve-centres of a generation impatient with the puritanical refinements of High Art, and more than willing to cut loose in an orgiastic fling. The work is modern, at least in date, and it draws on the kind of stylistic innovation that composers learnt from in Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex” and “Les Noces”; “Comparison shows, however,” as one critic remarked, “just how much Orff has coarsened and vulgarized his model”.
That barb was reasonably accurate, and it says as much about the audience as it does about Orff. Clearly he is not in the same league as Górecki. He should not be dismissed, though, as a mere vulgarian. There was another side to his career that merits unstinted admiration: as an educator. Orff devoted much of his working life to very young children. He believed that there was no such thing as an unmusical child, but that a child’s musical growth was all too often stunted by conventional teaching — by conventional piano lessons, one on one, with a rigidly orthodox teacher, followed by endless hours of boring practice. His approach was radical: he taught children in group sessions, and made music fun for them; he gave them simple instruments to play, some melodic, some percussive; he incorporated speech and movement together with the notes; he used traditional rhymes and easy pentatonic tunes; he laid strong emphasis on lively rhythm; and he encouraged improvisation. Some of his experiments were begun in the nineteen-thirties, in Munich, but were not encouraged by the Nazis. They bore fruit after the war, and his methods were widely adopted around the world, along with many of the child-size instruments he invented.
The Carl Orff of “Carmina Burana” is not perhaps a composer to be ranked among the greats. But as a teacher, and a very progressive one, he is someone to whom the world of music, and the world of children in particular, owes a tremendous debt of gratitude.
