Tanz: Uf dem anger (Carmina Burana)

Orff came across a printed edition of the Benediktbeuern manuscript — secular Latin, Middle High German and Old French verse copied in the thirteenth century — in 1934, and set twenty-four of the poems between 1935 and 1936. The premiere at the Frankfurt Opera on 8 June 1937 was staged, with dancers and scenery, as he intended it to be. Orff then wrote to his publisher that everything he had produced until then could be destroyed. The verses run from the turning wheel of Fortune through spring, the tavern and the court of love, and back to the wheel.