The Hazy Morality of Nazi-Era Music
Does American culture tolerate cryptic Nazi propaganda? Are millions of concert- and movie-goers nourishing Nazi aesthetics? On the anniversary of its premiere, let’s revisit the 20th century’s most popular piece of classical music, and its shadows of Nazism.
On June 8, 1937, under the baton of Bertil Wetzelberger, the Frankfurt Opera and Cäcilien Chorus premiered a cantata by a poor and little-known composer. This was Carmina Burana, a rhythmic, twisting work for large orchestral forces. Opening and closing with the rumbling “O Fortuna,” the first performance of Carmina Burana met thunderous applause. The cantata propelled its composer, Carl Orff, to international prominence.
Since 1937, Carmina Burana has been one of the few works of classical music to enter public consciousness, and one of only a handful to cross from the world of high art to that of popular culture. “O Fortuna” has been used by Michael Jackson, Ozzy Osbourne and Nas; by the bands Overkill, Evanescence and Trans-Siberian Orchestra; in commercials for Old Spice, Hershey’s Chocolate and Domino’s Pizza; in the films Excalibur, Glory and Last of the Mohicans; by political opposites Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow; and elsewhere. Parodied for its overuse, Orff’s work has become the clichéd music of apocalypse, catastrophe and war.
If somebody were to listen to “O Fortuna” today—and there are few who can’t recognize the pounding drums and dramatic howling of the chorus—they would likely describe it as “epic,” “intense,” or “apocalyptic.” They might smirk at the sexual tension in “Primo vere” and “Cours d’amours,” tap their feet to the throbbing “In taberna,” and relish the soaring “Blanzifor et Helena.” Certainly, not many casual listeners would think Carmina Burana political, and hardly anybody would think of a connection to the Third Reich. Yet Carl Orff reached the peak of his career under Hitler, and his famous cantata is closer to Nazism than you might think.
How can this be so? Carmina Burana doesn’t seem to have any relation to National Socialism. Artistic inspiration during evil times is no proof of guilt. The music is derived from Stravinsky, of whom the Nazis were suspicious, and certainly isn’t in the traditional style they revered. The texts in the cantata are part of the Burana Codex, a medieval poetry compilation, and are a mix of ecclesiastical Latin, Old Occitan, and Middle High German—all written nearly a thousand years before any Nazis had been born.
The poems don’t talk of nationalism, socialism, or any other ‘ism.’ Most are about sin and passion, about reckless gambling, lust and drinking. The tumultuous opening speaks of the Roman goddess of fortune as a terrible leveler of ranks. What do these irreverent themes have to do with Nazism?
Quite a lot, it turns out. The twin links are the work’s sentimental treatment of nature and folk life. The Nazis were radical environmentalists, twisting the Romantic love of nature into a modern paganism. Nazi leaders viewed forests and countryside as inseparable from the German people, the “Volk.” Hermann Göring, Minister of Forestry, spoke thus: “The people are a living community, a great organic, eternal body.” Hitler was of similar mind: “The German countryside must be preserved under all circumstances, for it is and has forever been the source of strength and greatness of our people.” Children in the Third Reich were often advised: “Ask the trees, they will teach you how to become National Socialists.”
Jews and other undesirables were guilty of, among other crimes, profaning the noble German landscape and its inhabitants. The policy of Dauerwald, which translates roughly to “eternal forest,” proclaimed that Jews have “as little right to be in the German forest as they have to be in the German Volk.” Part of the justification for the Eastern invasion was that Slavs could not tend their landscapes properly, and Hitler fantasized about “recreating” a pastoral Aryan paradise on Slavic land.
Inevitably, such reverence of nature spilled into matters of art—or perhaps art fueled the reverence. Either way, Hitler’s love of Wagner was not accidental: the Ring Cycle, for example, is all about hallowed folk tales. Spiritual creatures populate the ancient forest, some of them swimming in the primeval Rhine—Wagner’s symbols of a timeless, unalterable German landscape. Hitler was moved by the religious, almost pagan, depictions of nature and people in the composer's operas.
As it happens, Orff’s selections from the Burana Codex align neatly with the Nazis’ nostalgia for a folkloric idyll. While the poems themselves cannot have been written with German nationalism in mind, Orff’s careful arrangement suffuses them with ideology. A few excerpts can illustrate this handily.
Take, for instance, this part of “Vera leta facies,” the cantata's third movement: “The joyous meadows are laughing / a flock of birds rises up / through the pleasant forests / the chorus of maidens / already promises a thousand joys.” Consider the eighth movement, “Chramer, gip die varwe mir”: “Look at me, / young men! / Let me please you! / ... I will be obedient to you / because of the pleasures you afford.” Or the 10h movement, “Were diu werlt alle min”: “Were all the world mine / from the sea to the Rhine”; or this part of “Stetit puella,” the 17th movement, which was sure to evoke the Nazis' fabled Bavarian maiden: “A girl stood / in a red tunic; / if anyone touched it, / the tunic rustled. / A girl stood / like a little rose: / her face was radiant / and her mouth in bloom.”
After thinking about the text of Carmina Burana, it’s no surprise that this piece was so popular in the Third Reich. Despite a negative early review from the party outlet Völkischer Beobachter, Carmina Burana was praised as an artistic model of National Socialism, an “exemplary” composition that the Beobachter would later call “clear, stormy and yet always disciplined.”
A staple of the German repertoire by the 1940s, even at its 1937 premiere it was warmly received. Horst Büttner, a prominent bureaucrat in the Propaganda Ministry’s National Music Office, gave a particularly enthusiastic review. He excused the Latin text as “typically German,” praising the work’s “radiant, strength-filled life-joy of the folk” which “draws on the emotional world of folk song and folk dance.” Carmina Burana fit so smoothly into the Volk narrative, in fact, that censors were willing to overlook the poems’ sexual suggestiveness.
Do Carmina Burana’s accessible themes, glowing reviews and concert sellouts make it propaganda? Perhaps not, but you don’t have to write a paean to Hitler for a work of art to be morally sticky. Without doubt, Carmina Burana is eerily similar to Nazi agitprop. Not only do the poems parallel official nature worship, their imagery echoes posters of perfectly proportioned, sexually vital men and women, often in country scenes.
The famous “Mutter und Kind” poster features a woman breastfeeding a child in pristine farmland; a German village, complete with steeple, lies in the distance. In an advertisement for the League of German Girls, a pigtailed, red-cheeked schoolgirl bears a bouquet of flowers, sheltered by the stately party eagle. One poster shows a happy family flying a toy plane in a shimmering wheat field, and another an aerial view of a German village, surrounded by blossoms and shrubbery. Later, the Nazi occupation in Norway would release an image of a ghostly man in medieval armor next to a near-identical man in an SS uniform.
Hitler’s government liked Carmina Burana because it’s a ready-made sample of German mysticism. It fits the narrative: the timeless land, the fair maidens, and the strong, virile ancestors of modern Aryan soldiers.
And what of the music itself? It may be technically inspired by Stravinsky, but it’s bursting with Wagnerian bombast. Melodically straightforward, it contains little counterpoint, taking care to avoid what the state’s aesthetes disparaged as “elite culture.” Pulsing rhythms, visceral excitement, unstoppable drive, these are what Nazi rallies were supposed to feel like.
As such, German reviewers were pleased equally by the music as by the text. Büttner extolled Orff’s purported use of the “melodic and rhythmic style of the Bavarian-Alpine” and concluded that “If German musical creativity in our day can produce such a work, we need not worry that the general yearning for folk-related art will go unfulfilled.” Berkeley musicologist Richard Taruskin has argued that Orff’s style is quite similar to that of propaganda. He notes that the use of “O Fortuna” in advertising, films and pop songs is further proof that it’s “mass music,” designed for impersonal consumption by millions of people, and that it’s just as propagandistic now as it was in the 1930s. Indeed, the music has been described as the only type of modernism that could pass in Hitler’s Germany.
In fairness, Orff was no goose-stepping ideologue. A quarter Jewish, he never joined the Nazi Party and made an effort to stay out of politics. But he was an opportunist who prospered from Nazi patronage. We cannot know for sure whether he intentionally pandered to Nazi aesthetics, but it’s hardly a coincidence that Carmina Burana became the Third Reich’s model artwork, and Orff was happy to receive the money and praise. He was neither hero nor villain, and the morals of his music are likewise hazy.
Are we allowed to listen to Orff’s cantata with a clear conscience? If we remove the work completely from its origins, as countless films and advertisements have done, then yes, we probably can. The work’s universal applicability may be its redeeming feature. Propagandistic “O Fortuna” may be, but deodorant propaganda isn’t Nazi propaganda. After all, there’s a lot of music more malicious and nakedly hateful than Carmina Burana, and liking the piece doesn’t make you a Nazi sympathizer. And yes, alone, these poems of medieval clergy are innocent love songs. But 20th century regimes exploited old texts for sinister purposes, and as components of Orff’s cantata the poems take on a new, unsettling meaning.
For this reason, we must still be cautious when listening to Carmina Burana. A person completely ignorant of the work’s background, who doesn’t know a word of the text and just likes the music because it’s exciting, is still enthralled by its inflated folklore—still stimulated by its mass appeal. Sure enough, this is the intended effect of Nazi propaganda. Carmina Burana is that propaganda’s uncomfortable cousin. We can listen, but we must listen carefully.
