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This choral cantata, celebrating the simple joys and sorrows of the flesh, was the most famous and successful piece of modern music to come out of Nazi Germany.

Carl Orff composed Carmina burana between 1934-1936. 40 years old, shortly after Hitler’s seizure of power, Orff had been marked down by the Nazi authorities as a potential ‘cultural Bolshevist’. However, propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels promoted Carmina Burana as a ‘celebration of the life instinct’.

Carmina Burana (‘Songs of Beuern’ – Beuern comes from the Old High German for Bur, a small house) was the title of a 1847 publication by the medievalist Johann Andreas Schmeller of a 13th-century manuscript collection of poems and songs. Orff based the work on these medieval texts charting the joys, fickleness and excesses of human life. This grand chorus is based on the cardinal image of the Wheel of Fortune and it dominates the whole work.