TUESDAY, October 22, 2019
Carmina Burana, age 40
The composer is Carl Orff, but it is unlikely you will ever hear anything else by this composer except this one selection, which is now almost universally recognized.
Excalibur…
I remember seeing this in the early 80s, and I probably watched it a dozen times. It was first popular in 1981, and that is when I first heard this piece. Strangely it is wrongly remembered as part of the film score to The Omen. But it was not in that film.
This was Patrick Stewart’s film debut.
He was King Leodegrance, Queen Guinevere’s father.. so yeah, Picard is King Arthur’s father-in-law..
As for using so much of Carmina Burana in it, the director used O Fortuna, Imperatrix Mundi to show the hand of Fate coming down on England.
Sad thing is, there’s *so* much more to this than O Fortuna. I get a big kick out of “In Taverna”
This work is based on Carmina Burana: Cantiones Profane, its really stories of raunchy road trips undertaken by teachers and students in the middle ages, you can think of it as wandering minstrel or vagabond songs.
This is recent, Orff did it in 1935.. the source material is from the 11th and 10th centuries, when Latin was the language of the land. All land, apparently, that wasn’t China or Russia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmina_Burana
This is interesting. It sounds very dark.
I’ve heard this so many times before, so I didn’t need to listen. It’s a classic, it symbolizes power and uncertainty.