Oh, You Fortuna Kid!

 

O Fortuna! Like the moon, a
Vast and slowly turning wheel.
Rising, trending, now descending,
Sans regard for what we feel.

Blame the Muses, make excuses,
Pin our guilt on other hands
Yet it finds us, and it grinds us
Mocks vain prayers and rash demands!

That's not an actual translation. It's more like my impression of the import of the beginning of the most famous bit of choral blustering, known to us in its many uses in action movies, action movie trailers, and TV commercials.

The verses come from a book called Codex Buranus, found and named for a Bavarian monastery in the opening years of the 19th century. The choral setting is from the late 1930s by composer Carl Orff, who told his publisher he could destroy all his earlier material, because his composing career started with his 'scenic cantata.' It's still his most famous piece, though his Schulwerk has also found its way into some hearts and TV ads. I've searched for more things by him that I can like as much, and though I haven't succeeded at that, I can't say I looked and listened in vain. It's just that he only had one piece in him that was this brilliant.

Maybe it's because of the words. When I wanted to put translations into my piano-vocal score of the cantata, I had to use the subtitles from a TV performance for some of them. Orff jealously guarded the texts, or at least their translations, with the result that many LPs and CDs were sold without them by groups that didn't mind paying for the right to record it, but balked at the additional price he and his lawyers wanted for including translations. I Am Not A Lawyer (IANAL), so the legal intricacies of this escape me.

When we were last in London, I got to walk from our hotel to Boosey & Hawkes, music publishers, and run rampant through their showroom, bringing a pile of books with me as I went from one bin to another, now increasing, now diminished as I weighed my desires against my allotted funds. Here was a hardcover edition of the dizzying piano transcriptions of Gyorgy Cziffra, where many times a single measure took the entire width of the page to fit all the notes in. Too pricey for something I'd never even be able to slowly pick through, I decided. And there, just around a corner from Cziffra, was a handsome, substantial hardcover printed in multiple colors: a complete facsimile of the 11th and 12th century profane verses (some 13th century, too, I'm told) that make up the corpus of the Codex burana. Man, oh man! What a feast! I couldn't understand a word of it, even if I'd been able to pierce the veil of the antique hand it was in, but it was gorgeous. Incomprehensibly gorgeous. I picked it up and put it down repeatedly, "like a dog that was too full to eat any more, but didn't want to leave his bowl," as Raymond Chandler once said. Finally, I sighed loudly enough for Cathy to hear me back at the hotel, and put it down for good. It would have taken about half the money I had, if not more. I picked it up again and looked at it once more before I left.

Today, I happened to think of the book again, as I do now and then, and it occurred to me that everything's online somewhere. After finding some copies being offered for sale (yeah, like I have  more money now than I did then), I looked harder and found that my friends at the IMSLP--source of so many pieces of Public Domain music that I'd never have found otherwise--have the whole thing, and apart from the annual pittance I pay to help support IMSLP, it would only cost me a little temporary bandwidth and 66MB of storage.

 

Here's the most famous bit. Most people you will run into who know what "Carmina Burana" is are probably talking about the part that opens and closes the set--24 poems in all--whose thundering "O FORTUNA!" is part of a verse something like my loose paraphrase up there. We see Dame Fortune at its center, and an ambitious man crawling up the right. He becomes King at the top, then falls, and is broken beneath the wheel he once ascended to glory. That ought to sell a few running shoes!

Most of the book is text, though from time to time the exuberance or boredom of the scribe breaks through into a marginal illustration or richly ornamented capital. The book's pages have been broken up over the centuries, and rearranged, and lost, and sometimes found again (seven of the pages turned up somewhere else and were deemed part of the text).

What are the contents? These poems are drinking songs, songs of debauchery, declarations of love for pagan gods and goddesses, songs of feasting, the excitement of the discovery of Amor, a lament from a goose being cooked, and more. Knowing the content of the songs has added to my enjoyment greatly (as with Schumann's incredible setting of Heine's aching verses in Dichterliebe), and I'm glad I spent the time awkwardly inking the translations, however good or stilted they were, into my score. Without spending time in comparison, I'll note that there are multiple versions online now. This one seems fairly recent, and includes some poems that didn't make Orff's cut.

And (I have to break the paragraph here, or the previous link sticks to my foot like toilet paper to a shoe) here's another recent version, made apparently to be effective when sung. I considered myself lucky to have a handful of the lyrics included in a collection of medieval song verses that I found at a college bookstore sale in the early 80s. Just that much more I didn't have to transcribe from a paused VCR. There was one line I had to translate myself, because it wasn't in any of the versions. Yeah, that one was the talk of the Academy, all right.

Incidentally, one of my lasting regrets, apart from not spending sixty quid or whatever it was for the facsimiles, was that I didn't have a quarter to hand when I stood in the Salvation Army store in Loveland one day in the 70s looking at an LP that said it was Carmina Burana sung in English! I've mentioned this several times in classical newsgroups and such, and nobody else on earth has ever seen or heard of such a thing, except for me and whoever bought it before I got back to that store with cash in hand to return to the place in the bin where I'd carefully tried to hide my prize from other eyes. Okay, and whoever sold it to them. And the record company, and the singers, and yeah yeah, we get it.

Anyway, here's the haul: Codex buranus (Carmina Burana) pages at IMSLP. I'd say more, but everybody probably just left. And I was going to sing, too.
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