Carmina Burana Is Metal as Fuck

When I mentioned on Instagram that I’m super psyched that Seattle Philharmonic will be performing Carl Orff’s 1936 choral masterwork, Carmina Burana, this month, a friend DMed me to say:

“I used to write and produce movie trailers, and there was a point in the ’90s where the Carmina license holders said, ‘ENOUGH!’ after this piece was used ad infinitum.” 

He linked me to the trailer for 1993’s Cliffhanger, explaining that an unofficial moratorium was placed on anything from Carmina Burana, so saturated was the era’s media with music from the cantata.

All of this is to say: If you don’t think you know this piece, well, you do. Perhaps only a small chunk of it, “O Fortuna,” the hard-hitting, Latin-chanting opening theme and closing reprise, or possibly more. It’s been the source of the soundtracks to scads of movies, among them the aforementioned Cliffhanger, Excalibur, Die Hard 2, The Omen, and Natural Born Killers. Baz Luhrmann ripped it off in William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, rebranding it as “O Verona.” It’s the login music in World of Warcraft. It’s been used to advertise Gatorade, Hershey’s, Old Spice, and Domino’s Pizza and has been quoted by The Simpsons, How I Met Your Mother, The Twilight Zone, South Park, and The X Factor, alongside manifold others. This stuff is already in your skull.

Carmina Burana was so popular in the early ’90s, it got even copped into this ridicularious NYC dance banger:

Good news, tho: The rest of the cantata is just as heart-rending and blood-boiling and intense as the opening track. If ever you’ve considered becoming a regular consumer of live orchestral music, now’s the time because Carmina Burana is a delicious gateway, and the Seattle Philharmonic is performing it at Benaroya Hall on January 25. Even if folks didn’t already know the hell out of the radio hit, “O Fortuna,” anyone with a basic appreciation for even the poppiest ’80s metal could enjoy the whole show because Carmina Burana is the larval form of the first new wave of British—and later American—heavy metal. 

To begin, Orff nicked the lyrics off an 1847 translation of the Codex Buranus, a collection of medieval Latin Goliardic poems from the 12th and 13th centuries. Performed in mostly Latin with a touch of old French and Middle High German, the songs Orff wrote around the poems tell boisterous stories of fate, destiny, love, wealth, sex, time, the sun, the woods, and getting drunk. I don’t know what’s more Ozzy than that.

It’s no mystery why this shit gets picked for action dramas over and over. It’s a perfect minor-key soundtrack for someone falling off a cliff in the Italian Dolomites, for a horse race through a gloomy forest, for some evil thing that a villainous god devised to antagonize puny humans. The power is palpable. It transcends time, space, and Stallone.

 I hear Orffean influences in this death metal band from Greece, Septicflesh:

Carmina Burana comprises 25 short, one-to-five-minute movements and is structured into five separate sections, representing different aesthetic settings. The first of these sections is the ominously resplendent four-chapter prayer to “Fortune, Empress of the World,” and things are kicked off with movement no. 1, “O Fortuna:” the bassoon and the oboe orbiting each other in the intro, as the full choir chants manaically in Latin. This is the song you know from World of Warcraft. Per the lyrics, the choir is bitching and waxing melodramatic about how the goddess Fortuna will just play games with your life, and there’s nothing you can do. This section is for reveling in and becoming overwhelmed by. Damn, Fortuna, can you chill?

The second and third sections, “In Spring” and “In the Meadow,” are pretty similar: dancy and bouncy with lots of building horns and crashing cymbals. Spring has returned, and the little medieval people are pumped. The repeated dance rhythm feeds on itself here, and it all gets whipped up into a frenzy while the singers describe a flowery festival of men and maidens in a lush Teletubbies landscape. I hear an echo of “Pure Imagination” peek in and out here, although who knows if the Willy Wonka composers intentionally cribbed it.

The power metal returns for the “In the Tavern” section, starting with movement no. 11, “Estuans interius” [“Seething inside”]. This whole section is so badass—it’s the baritone belting out, like, angry declarations of lust, finishing with the lyric, “I am eager for the pleasures of the flesh, more than for salvation / My soul is dead, so I shall look after the flesh.” How very Ronnie James Dio. In no. 12, “Olim lacus colueram” [“I once lived on lakes”], the drunken tenor sings about being a swan that’s getting roasted over a fire. Bro, what? No. 14, “In taberna quando sumus” [“When we are in the tavern”], is straight-up a raucous drinking song. When they’re singing “bibit” a bibillion times, they’re talking about how everyone drinks: The mistress drinks, the master drinks, the soldier drinks, the priest drinks. Hell yeah.

The first half of the fifth section, “In the Court of Love,” reminds me of a smeary longhair metal ballad, a neoclassical precursor to “High Enough” by Damn Yankees. Soloists sing tenderly about courtship and beauty, and there is a boys’ choir involved, somewhat creepily. Keep an ear out for Orff’s musical impersonation of Igor Stravinsky’s chaotic 1921 cantata Les Noces in no. 18, “Circa mea pectora” [“In my heart”]—it’s a respect track for Stravinsky, like Shaboozey quoting J-Kwon. This also is where things start getting slutty: “May the Gods grant what I have in mind: that I may loose the chains of her virginity. Ah!” In no. 19, “Si puer cum puellula” (“If a boy and a girl”), the lyrics are about the physical pleasures of fucking, to which the full chorus responds with a horny roundelay in no. 20, “Veni, veni, venias” (“Come, come, pray come”). Heh. We get back to the good metal by no. 22, “Tempus et iocundum” [“Time to jest”], in a mathy mix of fast/slow tempos and weird time signatures. Then the soprano is swooning in sexful rapture by no. 23, Dulcissime. 

Movement no. 24, “Ave formosissima” (“Hail to the most lovely”) is a mini-section of its own, serving as a heavy buildup to the reprise, with thundering drums and gongs and cymbals and orchestral flourishes. Listen for that last tenor note! It’s a corker.

Then it’s all bookended by the almighty chorus: “O Fortuna,” the hook from your favorite Gatorade commercial, is both the engine and the caboose.

Carl Orff may not have IDed as a metalhead, but as a former Cornish kid and classical piano burnout who’s edited several books about metal bands: That’s what his work sounds like to me. Carmina Burana is a tornado of human emotion and raw nature and primitive worship and erotic lust. It’s brutal, loud, and vulgar at times and jubilant at others, switching between crazy shouting and soaring melismatic solos. Although these songs are only a century old, their lyrics are ancient, resulting in a work that’s morose and ecstatic, pious and sexy, mathy and diverse. There’s a reason they’re performed so often—they fucking rule, and there’s nothing like getting bowled over by their earthy, uncanny power in person. You gotta go. As Chuck Schuldiner from Death would say, let’s keep the metal faith alive.

A note: Composer Carl Orff is sometimes associated with the Nazi Party because the Nazis fucking LOVED this album. Following a 1940 performance in Dresden, Carmina Burana was touted by the German dictatorship as an example of Aryan excellence, no doubt fueled by the whole total-world-domination vibe. But Orff never joined the Nazi Party. He was a member of the Third Reich’s Reichsmusikkammer, but it was mandatory for working German musicians. While the Nazis were raging to Carmina Burana, Orff, who had Jewish ancestry, proceeded to shut the fuck up, ostensibly so he wouldn’t get murdered or otherwise punished. Some historians have criticized Orff for allowing the Nazis to commission and co-opt his work without protest, pointing to the increase in his personal income during this time. But 90 years later, I think it takes a real broad brush to castigate someone who was hiding an ethnic secret from the Nazis and likely just trying not to die. 

The Seattle Philharmonic will perform Orff’s Carmina Burana at Benaroya Hall Sat Jan 24, 2 pm, $20–$28, all ages.