Carmina Burana

In 1934 Orff came across an antiquarian catalogue from Würzburg listing Carmina Burana — songs from Beuern, after the Benedictine abbey of Benediktbeuern in Bavaria, where a librarian had found the manuscript in 1803. The collection holds some 254 poems in Latin, Middle High German and Old French, written between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries by largely anonymous clerics and wandering scholars. Orff set twenty-four of them and described the result not as a cantata but as secular songs for singers and chorus with instruments and stage pictures. Frankfurt saw the first staging in 1937.