Carmina Burana , Carl Orff (Ponnelle)

This was the dramatic rendition of Carl Orff’s most famous piece of music, how he wanted it to look but seldom performed as such nowadays. It was finally filmed by West German TV in 1975 with the close co-operation of Orff in honour of his 80th birthday. The various stories of young lust and gluttony are playfully and skillfully brought to life. This version of Orff’s masterpiece of the sacred and profane was hard to find in Germany. Not so strange, it was banned there for decades, most likely because of its almost literal interpretation of the texts Orff put music to. I first saw this when I was 12-13 years old at the Goethe Institute in Bergen, Norway, with my father, sister and mother. Someone had managed to get hold of an 8mm film roll with it and had a secret screening. This was in the 1980s and, believe it or not, there were strong forces opposed to what they considered blasphemous content in films. The mixture of Christian and pagan imagery is completely consistent with the lyrics, which were f