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Fortune might seem good, fortune might seem bad the point is, fortune is beyond us all. And finally, “O Fortuna” finishes it off. “Fortune plango vulnera” follows: on the other hand, sometimes fortune works against you. “O varium fortune” is presented first! We meet fortune in all its fickleness, but the poet insists the fickleness can indeed work in particular humans’ favor, at least temporarily. This concept then bleeds into the first-person lament of their own bad situation in “Fortune plango vulnera.” Carmina Burana booms open with “O Fortuna,” about the qualities of fortune itself, a force beyond God and nature alike. (Of course, that patrician ruler had still best beware: “ Fortune builds up and tears down / now abandons those it earlier helped.”)īut Orff and Hofmann didn’t just skip the poem that focuses on the apex of the wheel-they also rearranged the order. The poem starts off almost…dubiously admitting the system is not as bad as it could be? “ Paras huic praemium / quem colere tua vult gratia: You prepare a reward for him whom your grace wishes to build up.” Fortune, this poet notes, can raise a pauper from the gutter, can choose a blustering populist speaker to become an elite patrician ruler.
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Folio 41r ‘Wheel of Fortune’ from Epitre d’Othéa Les Sept Sacrements de l’Eglise You don’t need Latin to gather that this is another one about fortune, and more to the point, about the whims of fortune. It turns out that when Orff and archivist Michel Hoffman winnowed down the Codex Buranus poem to the 24 of the Carmina Burana, they skipped one called “O varium fortune.” (Fortunately for us all, Corvus Corax did not skip it when recording their version of the poems, Cantus Buranus). So riddle me this: if Fortuna turns every king who reigns into a man without a kingdom, why does the maiden (or…not maiden) of Carmina Burana’s “Chramer, gip die varwe mir” exult the rich pleasures and bounty of the world? Why can the poet of “Amor volat undique” rejoice that “love flies everywhere / young men and women are joined together, and rightly so”? Here, indeed, is our calamitous Dark Ages of disaster and death, where harvests fail for seven years straight and kings lose their thrones to their once-beloved rebelling sons.
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Fortune is the empress of the world and she does not care about you. The poet portrays himself as crushed beneath the bottom of the wheel, but he warns that even the person at the top must beware.Īnd so, the Carmina Burana, the iconic statement of “medieval music,” crescendos open with a fortress of fatalism. The wheel of fortune turns I descend, having been brought down / Another is raised up he is exalted-too much!Īha! Here it is, our explicit Wheel of Fortune-always turning, subject everyone to it. First:įortune rota volvitur, descendo minoratus / Alter in altem tollitur, nimis exaltatus: “Fortune plango vulnera,” on the other hand, embodies Fortune in two forms. First, in “O Fortuna,” Fortune is portrayed as fate, almost a disembodied force. Two key differences separate this poem from the other. Indeed, in this song, the poet is not having a good time. In the Carmina Burana, “O Fortuna” segues smoothly into another poem, “Fortune plango vulnera”: I lament the wounds of fortune. Fortune cuts down even the strongest man, the poet sings, “so everyone, lament with me!”
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Over and over, the poet calls Fortune veiled and shadowed ravaging and healing and treating human life as a game. Its theme is the spinning wheel of fortune itself-an immutable, inscrutable, and above all, fickle force. “O Fortuna,” the first of the two pieces that comprise the Carmina Burana’s opening sequence, turns out to be a great fit for the sports games and sporting good ads it so often underlines in popular culture.
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O Fortuna, velut luna, statu variabilis / semper crescis aut decrescis: Oh Fortune, like the moon, with an ever-changing state / always waxing or waning. This concept, as we’ll see, drives our most iconic “medieval music.” Or, if you will: I have reigned, I am without a kingdom, I will reign, I reign. Classic Wheel iconography, like Carmina Burana’s, includes four figures, portrayed as kings, at compass points on the wheel: I will reign, I reign, I have reigned, I have lost my kingdom.
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