CARMINA BURANA
When I think of the Middle Ages, I tend to picture stone castles, monks, religious paintings, people wearing uncomfortable-looking clothes, and an overall atmosphere suggesting that nobody had been introduced to the concept of having a good time.
But then I discover Carmina Burana. And a small part of my somber view of the Middle Ages begins to change. The authors of the manuscripts are mostly anonymous, which is probably just as well. Some of them had a lot to say about drinking, sex, gambling, and the clergy. Is it my imagination, or does the word “clergy” seem to appear almost everywhere in the same paragraph as drinking and sex?
The Carmina Burana manuscripts are full of poems and songs about love, spring, money, fortune and all the other things human beings have been getting themselves into since the beginning. There is also plenty of vulgar language that would not have made it past the parish newsletter.
There are scenes that are playful, sensual, crude, funny, and sometimes downright strange. And some of the texts go considerably further than drinking songs and naughty love poems. One of them describes sexual assault in language that is anything but subtle.
When people hear the famous Orff work, they are not hearing a sanitized version of the medieval material. Some of the crude and explicitly sexual poems made it into Orff's Carmina Burana as well. So, if you're listening to the music in the video below, keep in mind that some of what you're hearing comes from a collection of medieval poems that could be surprisingly filthy, irreverent, and occasionally disturbing.
These are manuscripts from the early 1200s, yet some of the subjects feel remarkably modern. I am guessing, people in the Middle Ages were not spending all their time sitting around in cloisters contemplating their sins. They also drank, fell in love, lusted after one another, lost money, complained about their luck. They had simply discovered that life is short and the tavern is open.
And that's the thing, about Carmina Burana. I don't need to dissect every musical phrase. I can also look at these manuscripts and think: Well, these medieval bastards were not so different from us after all. Eight hundred years later, we're still drinking and fucking, losing money on bets, complaining, and generally making a mess of things. I have a feeling that civilization was never the point, and still aint' it!.