The Search: Carmina Burana by Carl Orff

For the past four decades, Carl Orff's Carmina Burana has been performed somewhere in the world every day of every year. The German composer's cantata is one of music's most resilient works, heard in concert halls and movie soundtracks, video games and hip-hop samples.

On January 17, 2009, a spectacular touring production of Carmina Burana rolls up at the O2 arena in London. 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”.

Orff's ties to the Nazi's are no secret. He wrote new music to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so that the famous score by the Jewish composer Felix Mendelssohn could be banished.

In an article for the Times Online (UK), Richard Morrison writes about a new, uglier secret of Orff's past, brought to light in the film "O Fortuna" by Tony Palmer:

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 de-nazification 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 apologizing for his behavior. He craved Huber’s forgiveness – even, it seems, from beyond the grave.

O' Fortuna - Carmina Burana