O Fortuna! The Charm of the Wheel of Fortune

Carl Orff, the composer of the cantata Carmina Burana, started to publish his music at the age of 16. Most of his early works were based on German poetry. Later, he served in the German army during World War I, which changed his life forever. He developed a music teaching method for beginners in the 1920s and spent much of his remaining life working with children.

Orff’s premiere of Carmina Burana in 1937 in Frankfurt was a great success. At that time, the 41-year-old composer Orff wrote to his publisher, saying, “Everything I have written to date, which you have, unfortunately, published, can be destroyed. With Carmina Burana, my collected works begin.” Over the past some 80 years, O Fortuna has been a beloved musical piece across movies and TV programmes. For example, it was used in the trailer of the 1980s movie Excalibur; it has also been the introduction music for the judges of the reality TV music competition The X Factor since 2004.

However, the history that happened afterwards told us a different story. Unlike what Orff saw in himself, his works written subsequently have never been approaching the same popularity as Carmina Burana. Even Carmina Burana itself could not spawn a new form of musical theatre. Carl Orff (1895–1982) was a Munich-born Jewish composer who spent his life experiencing the two world wars. Guarding the secret of being quarterly Jewish, Orff managed to survive. He even gained fame, money, privileges, and dozens of performance opportunities thanks to his masterpiece Carmina Burana during wartime in Nazi Germany. He could not resist the temptation of his successful career and gave up the chance to emigrate to the United States in 1938. In the post-war years, his reputation never recovered, mainly because of political reasons. Orff’s life as a composer was like a reflection of O Fortuna — fate is like the Moon, changeable, ever waxing and waning.