Program Notes: Carmina Burana

GIOACCHINO ROSSINI  
Overture to William Tell 
BORN: February 29, 1792, in Pesaro, Italy 
DIED: November 13, 1868, in Paris 
WORK COMPOSED: 1829 
WORLD PREMIERE: August 3, 1829, in Paris 

What to Listen For 

• The most famous part of this generally famous overture is its stirring conclusion, which effectively suggests rally and rescue. More poetic, however, is the preceding passage, which conveys calm after a storm; and, even more, the deeply poetic opening moments, scored unusually for five cellos. 

The most famous part of this generally famous overture is its stirring conclusion, which effectively suggests rally and rescue. More poetic, however, is the preceding passage, which conveys calm after a storm; and, even more, the deeply poetic opening moments, scored unusually for five cellos. 

Written in 1829, Guillaume Tell (William Tell) was the last of Gioacchino Rossini’s nearly 40 operas. It relates a melodramatic tale of resistance by Swiss patriots, led by the title character, against Austrian occupation during the Middle Ages. Despite some genuinely stirring scenes and many effective passages, it is infrequently performed today. The opera’s overture, however, has taken on a life of its own. Ironically, its fame tends to obscure the true worth of this piece, since its renown has stemmed largely from sections being presented out of context and acquiring associations Rossini never intended.  

Heard as a whole, the work proves masterful. Its opening is notable in its unusual scoring for cello quintet, the music vividly conveying the suffering of the Swiss at the hands of their Austrian overlords. (The political implications of William Tell were received sympathetically in Rossini’s native Italy, parts of which were still under Austrian domination at the time it was written.) The expressive harmonies of this prologue are indebted to Beethoven, and that composer’s “Pastoral” Symphony is clearly the model for the musical storm and its aftermath — the latter featuring a celebrated English horn solo — that follows.  

Suddenly, however, a trumpet call sounds an alarm and ushers in the famous galloping theme of the Overture’s closing section. While Rossini intended this passage to signify the rallying of Tell’s compatriots against their Austrian oppressors, listeners of a certain age will inevitably associate it with a certain masked lawman featured in a once-popular TV western series. 

QIGANG CHEN
L’Éloignement 
BORN: August 28, 1951, in Shanghai 
WORK COMPOSED: 2003 
WORLD PREMIERE: November 6, 2003, in Shanghai 

What to Listen For:

• Following a brief flurry of animated figures, we first hear a fragment of the folk-song melody that forms the heart of L’Éloignement, played over still, sustained tones. With further appearances, this melody becomes ever more fully revealed. 

Following a brief flurry of animated figures, we first hear a fragment of the folk-song melody that forms the heart of L’Éloignement, played over still, sustained tones. With further appearances, this melody becomes ever more fully revealed. 

“There is a Chinese proverb that says when a man is uprooted, he gains vital force,” writes the composer Qigang Chen. “If he remains stationary, he cannot flourish.” And yet, Chen observes, such advantage comes at the expense of being cut off from a familiar environment, family and friends. Leaving inevitably entails both gain and loss.  

Distance or separation, the result of leave-taking, is expressed in the French word éloignement. Not easily translated, its literal meaning, “farness,” best conveys its essence. That condition also finds expression in a peasant song from northwest China, Zou Xi Kou, or “Go West Beyond the Gorges.” This, Chen notes, is a love song about the departure of a beloved, its tone plaintive and pining. Its melody forms the heart of L’Éloignement, his composition for string ensemble. Chen chose this melody for the work, he states, for its simplicity and to give voice to his own feelings of separation and estrangement. 

Chen is no stranger to such sentiments. Born Chen Qigang (he has reversed his family and given names to accord with western custom), he experienced firsthand the effects of the “Cultural Revolution,” the radical upheaval that wracked China during the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Chastised for “bourgeois” attitudes, he underwent three years of isolation and “ideological re-education.” Not until 1977 did he resume his music studies, which had been interrupted. 

In 1984, Chen went to France. There, he studied with Olivier Messiaen and subsequently developed a flourishing career as a composer, garnering awards, commissions and performances. While remaining based in France, Chen has re-established ties to his homeland, which has recognized his achievements with retrospective concerts and the honor of writing the theme song for the opening ceremonies at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. For his part, Chen has made a point of exploring possibilities for combining Chinese and Western musical traditions.  

That fusion of east and west is evident in L’Éloignement. Both the folk-song melody, which reveals itself gradually over the course of the piece, and the more energetic figures that introduce and alternate with it clearly indicate the work’s Chinese musical roots. Yet the use of modern string orchestra, notation and even harmonies show a composer well-versed in Western compositional technique. L’Éloignement, Chen writes, “depicts separation, disorder, imagination and yearning. The music is both happy and sad, nostalgic and exciting, all of which account for the conflicting moods of the departing one.” 

CARL ORFF  
Carmina burana 
BORN: July 10, 1895, in Munich, 
DIED: March 29, 1982, in Munich 
WORK COMPOSED: 1935–1936 
WORLD PREMIERE: June 8, 1937, in Frankfurt am Main 

What to Listen For:

• Carl Orff stated that he intended Carmina burana to convey intense physical feeling. The work’s pounding and repetitive rhythms, simple motifs, elemental harmonies and huge orchestral sound-blocks indeed convey powerful pagan energy. But there are moments of quiet lyricism also, particularly in songs of love, and even intimations of innocence in the voices of a children’s choir. 

Carl Orff stated that he intended Carmina burana to convey intense physical feeling. The work’s pounding and repetitive rhythms, simple motifs, elemental harmonies and huge orchestral sound-blocks indeed convey powerful pagan energy. But there are moments of quiet lyricism also, particularly in songs of love, and even intimations of innocence in the voices of a children’s choir. 

In 1803, a remarkable manuscript was discovered in a medieval Benedictine monastery, in what is now southern Germany: a collection of secular songs and poems written by wandering students and minstrels during the 12th and 13th centuries. The verses, in Latin, Old French and Middle-High-German, touched a broad range of topics. They satirized the clergy and nobility; celebrated the passing seasons; complained of poverty and corruption; praised the pleasures of wine and song; and, above all, sang the joys and sorrows of love — all while expressing a fatalistic view of human destiny controlled by a “wheel of fortune.” By turns blatant and refined, these verses revealed a freshness that is striking even today. They were published in 1847 under the title Carmina Burana (“Beuren Songs”). In 1935, they came to the attention of an obscure German composer named Carl Orff. 

Orff is one of the more curious figures of 20th-century music. He received solid if unremarkable musical training and, like so many composers of his generation, absorbed the influence first of the German late Romantics, particularly Richard Strauss, and later of Stravinsky’s early work. But his interests soon spread beyond the concerns of modern composition. As a young man, he became involved with the theater and was soon fascinated by the possibility of combining the various arts to produce a spectacle whose total effect was greater than the sum of its parts.  

At about the same time, Orff developed a strong interest in early music, particularly that of the medieval and Renaissance periods. Finally, in 1924, he began an association with the dancer Dorothee Günther and with her, established an educational method aimed at “reviving the natural unity of music and movement.” Orff’s work in this area, and in early music education generally, continued for decades, resulting in the famous Orff-Schulwerk, a teaching program employing simple percussion instruments and rhythmic movement now widely used throughout the world. 

Far from remaining isolated, these interests came together in a fascinating synthesis in Orff’s creative work. He sought new ways to dramatize concert music, presenting staged versions of oratorios and other pieces. His own compositions relied increasingly on modal melodies derived from medieval chant, and on the percussion instruments and simplicity of utterance that characterize Orff-Schulwerk. Orff plainly was searching for a vehicle by which to bring these disparate elements together in a telling and original way. He found it in the Carmina Burana. 

Orff composed his setting of Beuren-monastery verses from 1935–1936. Upon completing it, he wrote to his publisher: “Everything I have written to date ... can be destroyed. With Carmina burana, my collected works begin.” One can understand how Orff might have been tempted to make this extreme declaration, for the sound of Carmina burana was virtually unprecedented. In an audacious gambit, Orff deliberately abandoned Western music’s traditional techniques of counterpoint and thematic development in favor of a deliberately primitive rhetoric. This aimed unapologetically for physical and emotional sensation rather than aesthetic response, and its raw emotive power cannot be ignored. 

Framing Carmina burana is a massive chorus, “O Fortuna,” whose allusion to both happiness and woe, “power and poverty alike,” sets out a broad canvass of human experience to be filled by the intervening numbers. These are divided into three large sections. The first, Primo vere (“In Springtime”), is a hymn to reawakening nature and love. In taberna (“In the Tavern”) addresses the pains and pleasures of hedonistic abandon. Cour d'amours (“The Court of Love”)—, the work’s final section, celebrates love and sensuality. A reprise of the opening chorus brings the work full-circle to conclude as it began. 

All notes by Paul Schiavo © 2023