![]() ![]() Shortly after receiving his denazification all-clear, Orff wrote out his feelings of guilt in an apologetic letter to the dead Huber - which was, of course, never made public.Īll this tells us a lot about Orff the man. Unsurprisingly, however, he was secretly ashamed of his guilty secret. Orff was given the all-clear he returned to public life and eminence in the new West Germany, where he worked and lived until his death in 1982. ![]() Eager to put himself on the right side of the Americans, Orff lied to his interrogators, claiming that he himself had been a co-founder of the White Rose group along with Huber. In 1946, the composer was interrogated by the denazification authorities. Indeed, as Palmer shows, it gave way to a much less understandable hypocrisy. Which of us can be confident we would have reacted more bravely in such circumstances? But Orff's moral slipperiness did not end there. Orff's self-protective reflex can certainly be understood. ![]() "He only thought about himself," recalls Huber's widow, Clara, in the film. Huber's wife pleaded with Orff to make representation or a statement on Huber's behalf. His first reaction was to bewail the danger that he himself would now be ruined. Orff called at Huber's house the day after the arrest, unaware of what had happened, and was informed about Huber's fate. This led to his arrest by the Gestapo in February 1943, after which he was tortured, given a show trial and executed. Indeed, Huber was a founder of the White Rose resistance movement. Huber, however, was an anti-Nazi oppositionist, unlike Orff. In his home town of Munich, Orff had long been a close friend of the Swiss-born academic Kurt Huber, who had helped him with his librettos for Carmina Burana and other works. But he prospered under National Socialist rule and he had a particular ugly secret of his own from the Nazi period, which Palmer's research has brought into the light. Watching clips of Orff in Palmer's film, it is tempting to see him as a recognisable type of postwar German, a man carrying his part of a shared trauma about which he preferred to remain silent. Mid-20th-century Germany was unusually full of adults who wanted to forget their own and their society's failings during the Nazi years. The composer sought to avoid personal and moral responsibility in most things, and then wished to be forgiven for his failure to accept these responsibilities. "He had his life and that was that," she tells Palmer. He could not sustain adult relationships - including with a daughter whom he rejected. He thought first and mainly about himself. The film, which takes its title from the opening phrase of Carmina Burana, makes it clear that Orff had the psychology of a permanent adolescent. The Nazi newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, once pointed to Orff's cantata as "the kind of clear, stormy, and yet always disciplined music that our time requires".īut, as Tony Palmer's new film about Orff, O Fortuna, establishes, there is another thing we ought to know about the composer as well. After some initial official discomfort about the work's frank sexual innuendos, Orff's cantata was elevated to the status of a signature piece in Nazi circles, where it was treated as an emblem of Third Reich "youth culture". But Carmina Burana also made Orff's name in Nazi cultural circles. Orff was so clear about the work's pivotal importance in his output that he later disowned almost everything he had written before it. Despite the tragedy of this situation, we still burn a flame of optimism in our hearts and look forward to the day when we can return in a time of peace to share the joy of music together again.It was the first performance of Carmina Burana in Frankfurt in 1937 that established the Bavarian, then 41, as a major musical figure. “We know you see the madness of your country’s leadership. “Since Thursday morning, we have spoken to many of our friends in Russia via social media and have encountered unanimous opposition to this violence and solidarity with our Ukrainian friends. This great country has inspired our band through its art and literature, and since we first played there seventeen years ago, we have built a rich and deep relationship with our Russian fans. The only reason for this is the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian state.” The Scottish rockers tweeted: "We are cancelling our Russian shows that are scheduled for this summer. Known for hits such as Into My Arms and One More Time With Feeling, joins artists including former One Direction star Louis Tomlinson and American rock band Green Day in scrapping gigs in Russia over the conflict, as well as popular Indie stalwarts, Franz Ferdinand. ![]()
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