Carl Orff's Carmina Burana

This book includes English verse translations by Mark Herman and Ronnie Apter of the poems in Carmina Burana set to music by Carl Orff (1895-1982) in 1936 and first performed in 1937. The Herman-Apter translations, which attempt to re-create the bawdy humor of the originals, were first published in 1975 and re-published with some revisions in 2012. Orff’s secular cantata for chorus, vocal soloists, and orchestra sets poems, mostly in medieval Latin with some German and French, selected by Orff from the collection of more than 200 lyric poems and 6 plays known as the Codex Buranus. The collection, which includes some poems in medieval Italian and English as well as the languages already mentioned, was discovered in 1803 at the Benediktbeuern monastery in Bavaria, where it had been stored in a cabinet uncatalogued for over 500 years. With it were Protestant and other forbidden works. The complete Codex has been published twice, both times under the title Carmina Burana, which means “songs of Buran,” that is, of the Benediktbeuern monastery. (The title is frequently mispronounced: the correct accent in the first word is on CAR.) The first edition, and the one used by Orff, was that by J. A. Schmeller in 1847. The second edition, the now-standard critical edition, was by Alfons Hilka and Otto Schumann, published 1930-70. Many of the poems in the Codex are also available from other medieval sources, but the Codex is the largest single collection of medieval secular verse yet discovered. Despite translations of many of the poems into several languages, Carmina Burana mostly languished on scholars’ shelves until Carl Orff’s cantanta brought them into prominence. For more information, contact Mark Herman and Ronnie Apter at <mnh18@columbia.edu> (mnh eighteen, not mnh el 8).