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Today yet another chapter in musical denazification, perhaps the most popular place of classical music in the world Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. This is the second epsiode where we feature the new technology of an electronically generated dialogue. If you find it convincing and compelling please stay tuned for the entire essay after the dialogue. Happy listening ahead.
Cultural denazification is left an ad hoc affair, the work of enterprising artists shoring up where
the state has fallen short. “Carmina” is particularly unwieldy as a “classical” text now recognized
primarily as part of commercial and entertainment media. But some new renditions and
reappropriations unwittingly function like theory and guideline for how to handle such cultural
plutonium. A recent performance by Opera Philadelphia, pairing the work with Margaret Bonds
“Credo” (with a libretto by W. E. B. Du Bois), comes closest to a rethinking of programming
practice that fuses trigger warning, inoculation, and counterpoint.
The lack of probity and hesitancy with regard to “Carmina” is a signal that the topic of cultural
denazification has largely been a non-starter. From the oeuvre of Leni Riefenstahl and its
application in “Star Wars” to the fashion of Hugo Boss, the aesthetic of the Nazi years is
pervasive. Given that the Nazi project was substantially a theatrical phenomenon, a phantasm
perpetrated by failed artists, this oversight amounts to both a cruel irony and a severe
misunderstanding of the nature of that once (and possibly future) enemy.
