The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. In the 29-volume second edition. Grove Music Online /General Editor – Stanley Sadie. Oxford University Press. 2001.

Orff, Carl

(b Munich, 10 July 1895; d Munich, 29 March 1982). German composer and music educator. Drawing on ancient Greek tragedy and employing models of Baroque theatrum emblematicum, he established a musical theatre of impressive force permeated at times by Bavarian peasant life and Christian mystery.

1. Life.

2. Works.

3. ‘Schulwerk’.

WORKS

WRITINGS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ALBERTO FASSONE

Orff, Carl

1. Life.

Orff was born into a family of army officers given to scientific and historical studies, whose members were also great music lovers. He began to study the piano, the organ and the cello at the age of five. In Munich he attended the Ludwigsgymnasium (1905–7) and later the Wittelsbacher Gymnasium (1907–12). Dissatisfied with the teaching of Beer-Walbrunn at the Akademie der Tonkunst (1912–14), he discovered for himself not only the sound world of Debussy, a fascination that is readily apparent in the music drama Gisei, das Opfer (1913), but also the musical language of Schoenberg. His activity as Kapellmeister at the Munich Kammerspiele (1917), where he was introduced by his piano teacher Hermann Zilcher, was decisive for his musical development. There he collaborated with the director Otto Falckenberg. The first version of Orff’s stage music to Ein Sommernachtstraum dates from that year, although the music was never performed. Drafted into the army in 1917, he was wounded at the front, and having been declared unfit for active service, he saw out the rest of the war first at the Nationaltheater in Mannheim and then at the Hoftheater in Darmstadt. On his return to Munich in 1919, he devoted himself to studying the music of the 16th and 17th centuries, especially Monteverdi, to whom Curt Sachs had drawn his attention. Between 1920 and 1921 he continued his studies with Heinrich Kaminski. In 1924 he founded, along with Dorothee Günther, the Güntherschule in Munich, an educational centre for gymnastics, rhythmic movement, music and dance; it was within these surroundings that he developed his concept of elementare Musik, a synthesis of gesture, poetic language and music that was later to fertilize his personal musical style and from which his Schulwerk would eventually evolve. The first edition of Orff-Schulwerk: elementare Musikübung, published in collaboration with Gunild Keetman and Hans Bergese, appeared during the period 1932–5.

Orff’s realizations of several Monteverdi scores, beginning with Orpheus (first version, 1923–4, to a German text by Dorothée Günther), were of pioneering significance. Between 1932 and 1933, he directed the Munich Bachverein, a concert society for which he staged Schütz’s Auferstehungshistoria (1933) and conducted several concerts. With the advent of National Socialism, he resigned from his post as director of the Bachverein. His first success as a composer, albeit not an unqualified one, came with the première of Carmina burana in Frankfurt on 8 June 1937. After the war Orff, along with his publisher, was accused of having exerted too great an effort in promoting his works under Hitler’s dictatorship. Particularly controversial was the first performance in Frankfurt (1939) of the third version of the incidental music to Ein Sommernachtstraum. Against the background of the racial discrimination exercised by the Nazis towards Mendelssohn’s works, the composer may indeed have ‘overestimate[d] the scope of musical autonomy in a state committed to a particular Weltanschauung’ (Maier, 9). However, Orff was not a member of the party at any time and entertained towards it no feelings of ideological sympathy. Nor were there among his closest friends or collaborators any supporters of the Nazi regime’s ideology. The fact that Carmina burana had been torn to shreds by Herbert Gerigk, the influential critic of the Völkischer Beobachter, who referred to the ‘incomprehensibility of the language’ coloured by a ‘jazzy atmosphere’, caused many of Germany’s opera Intendanten to fear staging the work after its première.

From 1950 to 1960 Orff held a chair of composition at the Hochschule für Musik in Munich. In 1956 he became a member of the order Pour le mérite for science and art; he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Tübingen in 1959, and in 1972 a second from the University of Munich; that year he was also awarded the Grosses Verdienstkreuz der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, while in 1974 the Katholische Akademie of Bavaria bestowed on him the Guardini Prize. During the period 1972–81 he was occupied with his eight-volume publication Carl Orff und sein Werk: Dokumentation (Tutzing, 1975–83).

Orff, Carl