For those listeners
who know his work principally via Carmina
Burana, Carl Orff’s oeuvre can be
tricky to appreciate. Not unlike Gustav
Holst, who never tried to repeat the
audience-pleasing success of The
Planets, Orff never completely revisited
the musical world of Carmina Burana.
The musical concerns of that piece would
continue to be important to him but
he never again made a piece with such
an intoxicating melodic feel. Instead,
separate aspects of the music would
be explored in a series of pieces, two
more companions to Carmina Burana,
a further trilogy of medieval based
works, Lamenti, the fairy-tale
operas Die Kluge and Der Mond
and the trilogy of Greek dramas Antigonae,
Oedipus der Tyrann and Prometheus.
In all these Orff explored,
in different ways, his concerns with
rhythm and speech patterns, writing
music of high impulse power, frequently
subjugating melody to rhythm, text and
dynamic level. For me, supreme examples
of how these concerns thread their way
through his works is a series of rehearsals
for Carmina Burana in which I
participated during the 1970s under
a pupil of Orff’s. For much of the time
we rehearsed without pitch at all, simply
using the text, rhythm and dynamics
for their most expressive purposes.
The result, at times, sounded remarkably
similar to some of Orff’s less ingratiating
works such as Prometheus.
Though Antigonae
and Oedipus der Tyrann were written
to German translations of the Greek
plays, in Prometheus Orff sets
the original Greek, taking extracts
from Aeschylus’s Prometheus trilogy.
The piece opens with a dramatic fanfare
on the drums and then the whole of the
first scene is taken up with the declaimed
dialogue between Power (Josef Greindl)
and Hephaistos (Heinz Cramer), during
which Prometheus is bound to his rock.
There is no pitch at all; the singers’
declaimed text is simply punctuated
by fanfares of untuned percussion. The
result demonstrates how expressive you
can be with music written without any
pitch.
From then on, the drama
is concerned solely with Prometheus
(Roland Hermann) who is chained to his
rock in punishment at having given mankind
fire. He is visited periodically by
the Oceanides (female chorus) and by
Oceanus (Kieth Engen). In the second
half he receives a visit from mad Io
(Colette Lorand) and is finally taunted
by Hermes (Fritz Uhl). But mostly he
speaks and sings great monologues. Here
Orff explores the gamut of vocalism
from declaimed spoken text to pure singing;
when singing, the vocal line is often
very close to Eastern rite chant. And
the accompaniment is minimal, quite
often forming punctuation points rather
than supporting the voice. Though a
full symphony orchestra is credited,
the principal timbre that Orff uses
is piano plus percussion (tuned and
untuned), but this does not stop some
of the orchestral outbursts being remarkably
loud. With the repeated ostinati and
frequent use of repeated chords, the
snatches of instrumental music have
a clear lineage from the composer’s
own sanctioned piano and percussion
version of Carmina Burana.
Orff manages to create
a marvellously different series of timbres
and textures; he is a true master of
his own, very expressive but limited,
sound world. Orff’s model seems to have
been the original performances of the
Greek plays where the choruses were
sung and music played a large part.
Though the solo parts are played by
singers, they declaim the text more
than they sing; the result is not so
much opera as music theatre. The resulting
sound-world has a remarkably modern
feel, evoking music by Xenakis and Tavener
and Stravinsky’s Les Noces.
The piece is not immediately
ingratiating, Orff eschews the crowd
pleasing gestures of Carmina Burana
including its luxurious orchestration.
But it is undeniably dramatic and every
single gesture is subsumed into the
service of the text. Cast, orchestra
and chorus unite in giving a wonderfully
confident and convincing performance.
The singers, particularly, are impressive
in the way they put over the Greek text,
persuading you that they really do know
what they are talking about.
In the title role,
Roland Hermann is supremely impressive,
embracing all of the multi-faceted role.
He is well supported by the other men
in the cast, Josef Greindl as Power,
Heinz Cramer as Hephaestus, Fritz Uhl
as Hermes and Kieth Engen as Oceanus.
As demented Io, Colette Lorand delivers
some truly blood-curdling cries; her
voice hardens rather in the upper register
which is probably perfectly suitable
to the character. Lorand’s performance
is truly fearless though her command
of the Greek prosody is not as convincingly
dramatic as the other members of the
cast. The women’s chorus sing with a
little too much vibrato and not enough
clarity of line, making them sound,
at times, rather too elderly.
A recording of the
piece was issued on the Orfeo label,
based on a live recording from 1975
made by the Bavarian Radio Symphony
Orchestra under Rafael Kublik in the
presence of the composer. But this studio
recording, made in 1972, is directed
by Ferdinand Leitner who gave the first
performance of the piece in Stuttgart
in 1968. Interestingly the 1975 recording
shares the same principals as this earlier
recording, namely Heinz Cramer, Roland
Hermann, Colette Lorand, Fritz Uhl,
Josef Greindl and Kieth Engen.
The disc comes with
a complete English translation of the
libretto, though the lack of a transliteration
of the Greek text means that one can
only follow the text in a rather loose
fashion. The informative article in
the booklet seems to date from the recording’s
original production and so fails to
give us a view of Orff’s achievement
seen with today’s eyes. The recording
has been re-mastered well and comes
over with clarity and a good dynamic
range.
This is an impressively
authoritative recording of one of Orff’s
finest scores. Prometheus is
certainly not an easy listen; but it
deserves to be better known and I hope
that this fine re-issue tempts more
people into exploring the work.
Robert Hugill
Womens Chorus of Westdeutschen Rundfunks 
