San Diego Early Music Society, City Ballet Pay Quirky Tribute to the Medieval "Carmina Burana" Manscript and Carl Orff's 1930's Setting

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, April 20) I went to an intriguing but ultimately disappointing concert at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral called Carmina Burana: From the Middle Ages to the Great Depression. Carmina Burana started out in 1230 A.D. as a manuscript found in 1803 in the monastery of Benediktbeuren in Bavaria, southern Germany. It consists of 248 poems, often satires of the ruling Roman Catholic dogmas as well as odes to love, drinking and the vagaries of fortune. In the mid-1930’s Carl Orff, a German composer who’d “made his bones” by winning a contest sponsored by the Nazi government to come up with a replacement for Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental music to William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, discovered the Beuren manuscript and decided to use it as the basis for a big (55-minute) piece for vocal soloists (soprano, tenor and bass-baritone), chorus and orchestra. Although the Beuren manuscript contained a few indications for what music would have been sung to the poems – mostly in terms of when the pitch should rise or fall – Orff ignored them and set the poems to his own original music. The opening two-minute theme, “O Fortuna,” has been used in quite a few film soundtracks (one online source lists Excalibur – which was where Geoffrey Gonzalez, who choreographed the Orff piece for a new City Ballet of San Diego production, said he first heard it – Speed, Diner, The Doors, the 1992 film of The Last of the Mohicans, The General’s Daughter, Diner, Jackass: The Movie, the 2003 Cheaper by the Dozen, Beowulf, Michael Moore’s documentary Capitalism: A Love Story, G-Force and the trailers to Glory, Cursed, Léon: The Professional and South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut), and like the opening theme of Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra (used in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey and innumerable parodies and TV commercials since) probably surprises people once they realize that there’s actually more to the piece than just the first two minutes.

The St. Paul’s Carmina Burana concert was intended to promote an upcoming production of Orff’s Carmina Burana (https://cityballet.org/performances/carmina-burana/) on May 4 and 5 by the City Ballet of San Diego, which, alas, is being staged not in their previous home – the Spreckels Theatre in downtown San Diego – but at the concert hall of the California Centre for the Arts, 340 North Escondido Boulevard in Escondido. (So much for any hopes I might have of seeing it, given that I don’t drive, my husband Charles has a driver’s license but not a car, and there’s no realistic hope of public transit to freaking Escondido.) Geoffrey Gonzalez decided to have his Carmina Burana set not in the medieval time period when the poems were written, but in 1929, in the aftermath of the Wall Street stock market crash that triggered the decade-long worldwide Great Depression. As his central character he chose James J. Riordan, who was the president of the County Trust Company bank in New York City, which did a lot of business with companies involved in farm produce. Riordan, a widower, shot and killed himself with a .38 caliber revolver on Friday, November 8, 1929, though the event wasn’t publicized until the next Monday for fear it would start a run on the bank. Ironically, it turned out that though Riordan had lost his personal fortune in the stock market crash, the bank was in O.K. financial condition. I’d wondered whether I’d brought an appropriate book on my way to and from the concert – The Wolf of Wall Street by Jordan Belfort, the memoir on which Martin Scorsese’s film of that title was based. I thought it wasn’t really the sort of book I should be reading inside a church, but given the story Gonzalez has chosen to build his ballet around, it seemed especially appropriate to read and think about all the heavy-duty drugging and whoring Belfort and his colleagues did while running their stock scams for which Belfort eventually went to prison.

The April 20 event at St. Paul’s consisted of a three-woman vocal/instrumental ensemble called The Goliards (after the irreverent, dissident monks who’d composed the Carmina Burana poetry in the first place) – Wendy Greene, Cathe Sobke and Ulia Sinz – performing seven Carmina Burana poems to modern-day reconstructions of the likely original melodies. The instruments they had included a Middle Eastern oud (ancestor of the lute and the modern-day guitar), a lyre, a bowed psaltery (a stringed instrument that looks like a cross between a dulcimer, an autoharp and a Japanese koto; though it wasn’t actually used during the concert, I’ve seen it in action before and it’s quite spectacular, especially when the player uses two bows, one in each hand), a small-sized harp and a viola da gamba (a medieval and Renaissance instrument that’s held in the lap and has frets, like a guitar; it’s commonly thought of as the ancestor to a modern-day violin and viola but it’s really part of a different family of bowed strings). The seven songs from the medieval Carmina Burana The Goliards performed were “Fas et Nefas Ambulant” (“Good and Bad Walk”), “Sic Mea Fata” (“By Singing I Ease My Fate”), “O Fortuna” (“Oh! Fortune”), “Bacche Bene Venies” (“Welcome, Bacchus,” a drinking song dedicated to Bacchus, the Roman version of the Greek Dionysus, the god of wine; few Americans know this, but “The Star-Spangled Banner” was also composed as a drinking song to Bacchus, “To Anacreon in Heaven” – look up the original lyrics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anacreontic_Song), “Dum Juventus Floruit” (“When Youth Was in Flower”), “Tempus Adest Floridum” (“The Time of Blossoming Has Come”), and “In Taberna” (“In the Tavern”).

The songs were the high point of the evening; after that came a lot of largely dull lecturing by John Nettles, conductor of the City Ballet Orchestra, and Geoffrey Gonzalez. Nettles brought out his guitar and, after admitting that it was out of tune (and not stopping long enough to tune it), demonstrated that the opening chords of Orff’s setting of “O Fortuna” were later used in such iconic pop, rock and soul songs as Ray Charles’s “Hit the Road, Jack” and Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” Gonzalez had wanted to demonstrate some of his choreography for the Orff work but he wasn’t able to connect his computer to the sound system in St. Paul’s Great Hall (which, despite its grand name, is not the church’s main chapel but a smaller room in a side building up a flight of stairs that poses a challenge to chronologically older people). So we didn’t actually get to see the show he’s created around Orff’s works and Riordan’s tragic fate. Gonzales did mention that before they perform Carmina Burana they will present another ballet, set to Mozart’s Concerto for Flute, Harp and Orchestra, K. 299, and that will be a far more formal and gentle piece of classical dancing. All in all, the Carmina Burana event at St. Paul’s was an interesting evening but it could have been a lot better, especially if (as I’d assumed he would) Gonzalez had brought some of his dancers down to perform part of the ballet, even to a recorded instead of “live” accompaniment. But I’m not sure where the dancers could have performed given how cluttered the stage was with The Goliards’ collection of oddball instruments!