Burying the Past: Carl Orff and His Brecht Connection

Abstract

In 1997, on the eve of the New York City Opera's production of Carmina Burana, a Holocaust survivor from Jerusalem telephoned me in my capacity as president of the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music to protest on behalf of Richard Wagner's great-grandson, Gottfried: How could you allow Brecht Weill's Sieben Todsgnden to be performed with Carmina Burana? After all, Carl Orff was a Nazi! That provocative indictment begs all sorts of thorny questions of fact interpretation. Several have already been formulated by Leon Botstein in his prefatory essay to the summer 1995 issue of this journal. How does music, through performance listening, assume then divest itself of political cultural meaning over time, wondered Botstein, and what can we make of the process of loss of memory reconstruction that emerges in the writing of history criticism?' Is there something elusive about music that permits it to resist equally the evil the good with which it is periodically allied? What permits us, fifty years later, to listen to Metamorphosen Carmina Burana without any sense of ambivalence recognition of history?2 Including Orff on his list of Nazi sympathizers linking Carmina Burana in particular with German fascist ideology in the 1930s, Botstein noted that works of music whose origin ide-