By Eben van Tonder, 27 March 25
In one of Europe’s most electrifying musical spaces, the Berlin Philharmoniker and Radio Choir, under the baton of Sir Simon Rattle, unleash the raw force of Carmina Burana, Carl Orff’s magnum opus. At the heart of this performance is the chilling and unforgettable movement that opens and closes the work: O Fortuna.
But this thunderous cry to the heavens is not merely a 20th-century creation. It is a cultural echo that reaches back into the early Middle Ages—into the world transformed by Charlemagne and awakened again in the 1930s by a composer who understood the power of rhythm, ritual, and rebellion.
The story begins in southern Bavaria, at Benediktbeuern Abbey. In 1803, during the secularisation of church property, a bundle of ancient parchment was discovered. Inside: over 250 poems and dramatic texts—written mostly in Latin, with some in Middle High German and Old French. These works, dating from the 11th to 13th centuries, became known as the Carmina Burana—Songs of Beuern.
They were the voices of the Goliards: rebellious students, travelling scholars, and clerical dropouts. They wrote with wit, irony, and fire about fate, drinking, springtime, and love—often in irreverent contrast to the formal teachings of the Church.
Their very existence was made possible by a transformation that began nearly four centuries earlier. Charlemagne (r. 768–814) had forged not only a Christian empire but a new European cultural order—one in which monasteries became centres of literacy and learning, and education was tied directly to moral and spiritual formation. He summoned scholars from across Europe, including Alcuin of York, and established schools in monasteries and royal courts. This initiative, known as the Carolingian Renaissance, preserved and copied ancient Roman and Christian texts and reignited a culture of intellectual inquiry.
From these monastic and cathedral schools grew the tradition of clerical education—young men studying grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, music, and theology. By the 11th century, these schools evolved into networks that allowed students and teachers to travel between centres of learning, debate publicly, compose in Latin, and form a distinct intellectual class. The rise of the first universities in Paris, Bologna, and Oxford in the 12th century formalised this movement—but its roots trace back to Charlemagne’s vision.
In my article Charlemagne’s Christianisation Strategy: A Unified Religious and Political Vision on Earthworm Express, I explored how Charlemagne didn’t just impose a new religion—he built a new cultural architecture: monasteries as centres of learning, basilicas as spatial symbols of inherited Roman inspiration, and pilgrimage as a continent-wide experience of shared spiritual and intellectual exchange. It was this pilgrimage culture that allowed cross-regional ideas to flourish—and the Carmina Burana is one of its byproducts.
These weren’t just monkish scribbles. They were what the youth did with culture once it was in their hands. They studied Latin, learned rhetoric, mastered music—and then they ran wild with it. They wrote about the wheel of fortune, about roast swans, about lust in the spring air. They drank deeply from the wells of monastery education—and made art that was both devout and defiant.
At the centre of these poems stands O Fortuna, the Roman goddess of fate. Life, as they saw it, was her wheel: one moment lifting the low, the next crushing the proud. The poem O Fortuna itself was likely written around 1230, during the high Middle Ages. It stands at the opening of the Carmina Burana manuscript and would be rediscovered centuries later to become the thunderous frame of Orff’s cantata. He opens and closes his work with this text, preserved here in full:
O Fortuna
velut luna
statu variabilis,
semper crescis
aut decrescis;
vita detestabilis
nunc obdurat
et tunc curat
ludo mentis aciem,
egestatem,
potestatem
dissolvit ut glaciem.
Sors immanis
et inanis,
rota tu volubilis,
status malus,
vana salus
semper dissolubilis,
obumbrata
et velata
michi quoque niteris;
nunc per ludum
dorsum nudum
fero tui sceleris.
Sors salutis
et virtutis
michi nunc contraria,
est affectus
et defectus
semper in angaria.
Hac in hora
sine mora
corde pulsum tangite;
quod per sortem
sternit fortem,
mecum omnes plangite!
O Fortune,
like the moon
you are changeable,
ever waxing
and waning;
hateful life
first oppresses
and then soothes
as fancy takes it;
poverty
and power
it melts them like ice.
Fate – monstrous
and empty,
you whirling wheel,
you are malevolent,
well-being is in vain
and always fades to nothing,
shadowed
and veiled
you plague me too;
now through the game
I bring my bare back
to your villainy.
Fate is against me
in health
and virtue,
driven on
and weighted down,
always enslaved.
So at this hour
without delay
pluck the strings of the heart;
since fate strikes down the strong,
everyone weep with me!
Carl Orff (1895–1982) encountered these texts in 1934 and composed Carmina Burana between 1935 and 1936. He selected 24 poems from the manuscript and built a “scenic cantata,” which premiered in Frankfurt on 8 June 1937 under conductor Bertil Wetzelsberger. Orff stripped away Romanticism and wrote in a style that felt ritualistic, raw, and ancient—closer to Greek theatre or pagan festival than to German concert tradition. He created not just music, but a living theatre of the Middle Ages.
Performers and conductors since have offered their interpretations. Sir Simon Rattle’s performance with the Berlin Philharmoniker (notably in 2004 and again in later years) is widely admired for its precision, choral power, and crisp energy. Yet it typically reflects the shortened concert suite, omitting certain movements.
By contrast, Cristian Măcelaru’s extended version, recorded with full score, restores the richness of Orff’s original design. Often-cut movements such as Swaz hie gat umbe, Chramer, gip die varwe mir, and Tempus est iocundum return, providing space for irony, innocence, and emotional range. Măcelaru treats the work not just as musical thunder, but as a ritual cycle of youth, spring, longing, defiance, and renewal.
That culture—the blend of ancient Roman inspiration, new Christian spaces, and youthful reinterpretation—is what I have explored in works like The Transformation of Purberg Hill (2024), How Did Ancient Humans Preserve Food? (2023), The Foundation for the Scientific Revolution (2024), and Sacred Cuts: The Intersection of Spirituality, Folklore, and Science in Meat Processing (2024). Each one brings a layer of context to the Carmina Burana world: the fermenting monasteries of culture, the sacred continuity of ancient structures, and the power of art and ritual to pass through the ages—carried by pilgrims, farmers, singers, and children.
The worldview expressed in Carmina Burana connects to the ancient myth of the Fates—three figures from Greco-Roman mythology who controlled human destiny. Clotho spun the thread of life. Lachesis measured it. Atropos cut it. They ruled even over the gods. The medieval students who wrote the Carmina understood this. Their O Fortuna is not just lamentation—it’s defiance. It is the song of those who know they can’t stop the wheel, but will sing with fire anyway.
When you hear Carmina Burana—especially in its full form—you’re hearing not just drums and choirs. You’re hearing the spirit of Charlemagne’s educational revolution colliding with the irreverence of youth. You’re hearing the fusion of sacred and profane, the wheel of life as seen by students in love with learning, longing, and laughter.
And as artists respond, and scholars bring this to contemporary audiences, we remember: culture is never static. It is inherited, embraced, reimagined. It is the art of living—sung from monastery walls, danced on village greens, echoed in concert halls, and remembered in our rituals of food, pilgrimage, and song.
So let us sing with them.
Let us cry out with them.
Let us live as they lived—
in all the unpredictability, the beauty, the absurdity, and the joy
of being human.
References:
- Earthworm Express. Charlemagne’s Christianisation Strategy: A Unified Religious and Political Vision (2024).
- Earthworm Express. The Transformation of Purberg Hill: From Utilitarian Resource to Sacred Christian Site (2024).
- Earthworm Express. The Foundation for the Scientific Revolution (2024).
- Earthworm Express. How Did Ancient Humans Preserve Food? (2023).
- Earthworm Express. Sacred Cuts: The Intersection of Spirituality, Folklore, and Science in Meat Processing (2024).
- Carl Orff, Carmina Burana (1937). Original score and performance history.
- Berlin Philharmoniker & Sir Simon Rattle. Carmina Burana performances, 2004–2018.
- Cristian Măcelaru, Carmina Burana – Full Score Recording, 2021.
- Grier, James. The Critical Editing of Music: History, Method, and Practice. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
- Southern, R. W. The Making of the Middle Ages. Yale University Press, 1953.