Carl Orff

Percussion, speech and bodily movement were the raw material Carl Orff worked with, with a background that included a Munich childhood of piano, cello and organ, an early pull towards the theatre, and then years of practical work on early music, Monteverdi above all, whose Orfeo he re-made for modern performance. Carmina Burana, first heard in Frankfurt in 1937, set medieval Latin and vernacular verse to hard-edged rhythm, repeated harmony and choral declamation; it became the first panel of the triptych Trionfi. Antigonae, Oedipus der Tyrann and Prometheus went further in the same direction, building a theatre out of ancient text and a percussion orchestra. His pedagogical work includes the Orff-Schulwerk, developed with Gunild Keetman, which teaches children through speech, singing, movement, improvisation and simple tuned percussion, and is practised in classrooms worldwide. He was born in Munich in 1895 and worked as a Kapellmeister at the Münchner Kammerspiele, the Nationaltheater Mannheim and the Landestheater Darmstadt before turning to composition full time; in 1924 he was among the founders of the Günther-Schule, where he headed the department for music in dance training. After the Frankfurt premiere he withdrew nearly everything he had written earlier and let Carmina Burana stand as his opus 1. The fairy-tale opera Der Mond followed in 1939, along with further stage works and incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream. He completed his studies at the Munich Academy of Music in 1914, took private composition lessons from Heinrich Kaminski after the war, and conducted the Munich Bach Society in the early 1930s. An early version of the teaching material appeared as Elementare Musikübung in the 1930s, before the Musik fuer Kinder volumes of the 1950s. His last work, De temporum fine comoedia, was given at the Salzburg Festival in 1973, and he died in Munich in 1982.