That ‘Ole Fortuna [Revisited]

Like its spit-turned roasted swan tenor from about midway through, Carmina Burana usually arrives overdone by performance week. However, this last run with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus was anything but. Well, I sure had fun. Despite what Sarah Bryan Miller had to say in the Post-Dispatch, it was a top notch performance, it packed the house and earned stadium-sized cheers every night, and it likely helped recoup from lost ticket sales this season.

Everyone’s had a taste of this piece, even for its occasional appearance in a commercial or battle scene. Audiences love it. It’s exhilarating, dramatic in every way. Choristers enjoy it because they shine in this piece, music directors program it because it’s a soft sell. The subject is provocative, the texts are brilliant and their settings are lush, there’s wit, there’s irony, there’s parody… and it’s all in the music too! 

How could a piece this successful be so… boring??

 

Umm, Not Minimalism

Ask anybody and you’ll get, “What a gorgeous piece! And what a big piece too!” Some will even tell you what they mean: “It’s kind of exhausting!” It’s true. By the end, you’re back where you began and wondering, “What’s the point?” We’ve heard it so much that it’s quotable, a cliché. Don’t believe me? Listen to James Horner’s 1989 score for the film Glory. We know the character of the music, its play on medieval tetrachords and fifths, simple strophic form, its parody of chant up against further parody of Verdi, bel canto, or any other genre used for vocal expression. We also know the brilliance of the texts and how they illustrate high culture in the mid-13th century from a completely pagan, wandering minstrel-student perspective. But maybe the texts deserved a better musical treatment.

It still remains a repetitive piece. Not in the way, say, a Steve Reich piece is repetitive. Reich’s music develops and unfolds subtly. There are problems in the development of Orff’s ideas, which go beyond his failure to acknowledge any static devices of form found in the musics of Eastern cultures, for example. Many earlier Western strophic pieces called on a coda for resolution or to carry forth ideas established in an A section. Orff usually gives us 2 periodic phrases, sometimes just barely related to one another, with no attempt to unify them further (as in Veris let facies). Often he relies too heavily on the basic formula (or gimmick!) of the piece he’s just set up, and his only conjecture is to repeat the exact same music with new words and, at best, a dynamic change. He carelessly underdevelops his ideas, constantly leaving us wanting more (or less, if you’ve made it to the third verse).

 

All you need is: limerence

The text tells us that, among other things, it’s about love. In her 1979-first-of-its-kind psychological study on the condition otherwise known as “lovesick,” Dorothy Tennov coins the term limerence to help identify healthy romantic love by defining what it is not. In Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love Tennov reveals a unique condition in which a subject insists on their state of being in love, but experiences both pain and pleasure in turbulent amounts. She calls it a state of perpetual “hopefulness” and “uncertainty,” in which the subject is constantly left waiting for a reciprocation of emotion by his/her object. In this state, she writes, equal magnitudes of pain and pleasure are typical, and the only force sustaining this condition is that uncertain, hopeful wait for reciprocity. How many pop songs have we just described?

To be sure, most of the texts in Carmina that claim to sing love’s praises more aptly describe Tennov’s “limerence.” Take for instance the soprano solo:

In trutina mentis dubia 
fluctuant contraria
lascivus amor et pudicitia.

which describes the internal burning between “lascivious love” and something like “modesty.” Or how about the Tempus est iocundum, which proudly boasts:

Mea me confortat
promissio
mea me deportat
negatio

“I am comforted by the promise; I am let down by the refusal.” There are indirect expressions of limerence too when you track the appropriate allegories to love. Take the aforementioned Veris let facies, which waits ardently for the coming spring and all its promised pleasures. This particular piece, number 3 in the set, is likely where the attuned listener will start to recognize a pattern: 3 verses of the exact same music, recurring themes in the text that ruminate on the same subject (hopefulness, longing, love’s loss), slow repetition of the most predictable type, and most of all, no development or resolution.

The piece that follows shares the exact same format, with keenly thirsting octave A’s between verses, slow and colored with string harmonics and piccolo - the dominant of favored D minor key center - nothing could be more impatient. At its end, this one foreshadows the “misfortuna” to return later, and that of the swan: “Whoever loves this much will turn on the wheel.” (Quisquis amat taliter, volvitur in rota.) Later, the swan will share his fate over 3 verses of the most ominous harmony in the piece, to be followed even later by the Circa mea pectora, the great depiction of anticipating the act of sex itself, amidst E minor arpeggios with an added C natural. (If Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms was a feature film, then Circa mea was the porno that came out 7 years later.) Tennov begins her study by suggesting that the limerent object LO represents, at the very least, a sexual opportunity for the limerent subject LS. But prolonged uncertainty and fantasy lead to a sort of obsessive longing for something much greater than sex, thus saith Tennov and personified in this unique 13th century document.

Whether Orff’s piece really is pornographic is worth contemplating. The 13th-century minstrel authors would have certainly been made to think so. Certainly the church would have viewed it this way. Orff’s musical mockery of the clergy by pairing some of the most pagan texts with unquestionably chant-like melody might support this, especially given his time and place in German culture.

True to its form, there are plenty of movements within the work that express overt excitement or musical ecstasy - alongside the appropriate imagery in the text, i.e. Si puer cum puellula or Veni, veni, venias which, again, imagine or anticipate sexual union with the beloved. Charmer and Chume, geselle min! explore a more flirtatious jaunt, and then there’s Dies, nox et omnia, which demonstrates the aloofness of the deeply lovesick, and the temporary daydreams of the beloved in this song are painted beautifully with the most wonderfully orchestrated D major nine chords, the baritone stretching into the delicate upper register. Tennov would remind us that such equally-juxtaposed magnitudes of ecstasy and misery are typical class-A symptoms in limerence.

 

rx: filled

The church in its day would call this pornography. Modern day conservatism might agree, and most would at least agree on “infatuation.” Tennov may be the first to define the internal logic of… well, whatever you want to call it. The point is that Orff expresses it fully in this work. We often analyze beauty in art the same way we do in people, and it’s plainly obvious here that human nature seeks something fundamentally more rewarding in its quest for beauty. Something more than the giddy promise of short term excitement, something with much more care to form, or at least development in the purest sense, or at least in the smallest dosage. Orff is as impatient with his musical material as a limerent subject is for his/her object. He incriminates himself by doing exactly what the text tells him to do; “Razzle dazzle ‘em, babe, and they’ll never catch wise,” as the song goes.

It’s nice to have Tennov’s basis in something that isn’t directly linked to the existence of a diety, instead relying on the tenets of secular beauty and its perception in society, which is kind of what Orff was after anyway. Personally, I happen to like Carmina, insofar as it sneaks past otherwise unwilling audiences a few of the devices of 20th century music. But in the end, Carmina Burana has exhausted its musical possibilities and remains interesting only for its expression of German aesthetic values, as a cultural record of the way Germans, in looking back on such a medieval document, might view the ideas of anarchy and sexual promiscuity.

~ by gnarlybuttons on 16 May 2008.