The song O fortuna! reminds us of all of this, even as it rings with a passion for life, a demand to seize and treasure the sweet moments that pitiful human existence affords. Men and women lived in a society that handed them a meager role, and few felt any control over their destiny. Of all the works, one rose almost immediately to prominence, helped along the way by Carl Orff’s career-making setting: O fortuna! We are reminded of the conditions of life that the authors faced-for their life was indeed nasty, brutish and short. Some of the pieces are in fact masterworks of studied ambiguity–their meaning changes radically depending on whether they are read in a pagan or Christian tradition. The songs themselves (and they contain rudimentary notation suggesting tunes to which they were to be sung) are at times spiritual, at times profane, filled with lust. We don’t know the authors, though academic speculation has come to focus on three individuals whose background suggests they were scholars, minor clerics, or warriors.
It was an amazing collection of sacred and profane works, mostly in Latin but occasionally with the lingua franca that later evolved into French and German, compiled at some point around 1230. In 1803, an ancient manuscript turned up in the recesses of the cloister of Benediktbeuern near Bad Tölz in Upper Bavaria.
We instinctively associate Latin poetry with classical antiquity, but some of the greatest works come from other times and cultures. Listen to a performance, with visual display of the text, of Carl Orff’s orchestral and choral setting of O Fortuna! from 1936:
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