Good day, dear Take in Mind readers! Inspired by your interest in the adventures of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, we decided to continue acquainting our readers with little-known pearls of world literature. Today we present a medieval hit, an anthology of secular lyrics Carmina Burana.
Carmina Burana (Latin for “Songs from Benediktbeuern”) is a collection of more than 250 texts dated the eleventh till the thirteenth centuries. The writings are mostly bawdy, irreverent, and satirical. Most of them were written principally in Medieval Latin. Some are macaronic, a mixture of Latin and German or French vernacular. Maybe, this is the reason why their authors are mainly known under the name of “Goliards” (Provençal for “Speaking incomprehensibly, fooling others”).
Who were these Goliards? Traveling scholars, students and seminarians, demoted clergy, i.e. people with some (maybe not completed) education, connected with the church or academic surrounding, and who were free in thoughts and spirit. The poetry of the Goliards is marked by a peculiar cult of the joy of life, equally alien to both church asceticism and the courtesy of the troubadours and minnesingers with their sublime love and cult of “the Beautiful Lady”. They composed parodies of the Holy Scriptures, played foolish masses, but their freethinking and satire related more to the Catholic Church than to religion. Therefore, the Goliards, in some sense, were moral guards over the purity of the Church, exposing the sins of the clergy.
For obvious reasons, most authors of the collection stayed anonymous. However, the most famous figures of the Goliard community such as Peter of Blois, Walter of Châtillon, the Archpoet of Cologne, and some others remained in the memory of descendants.
It would be dishonest to say that the works of these cheerful scholars are known only to the medievalists. In 1935-1936, the German composer Karl Orff wrote the Carmina Burana cantata based on 24 poems of the anthology. The first and last sections of the piece are called “Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi” (“Fortune, Empress of the World”) and start with the very well known “O Fortuna” poem, featured in many popular films.
Тhe free spirit of Carmina Burana significantly influenced Medieval literature and art. Natively, medieval scholars took up the initiative of their senior “colleagues”. According to some hypotheses, one of the Goliard’s poems served as a prototype for the famous De Brevitate Vitae song (more commonly known as Gaudeamus Igitur). The first version of the famous academic anthem was written in XIII-XIV centuries by students of the University of Heidelberg, and in 1781 German poet Kindleben provided the text with rhythms. The melody, most probably, was written by Flemish composer Okengeim in the fifteenth century. The first print of the present melody was in Lieder für Freunde der Geselligen Freude (“Songs for Friends of Convivial Joy”), published in 1782, together with Kindleben’s German lyrics. The first publication of the present Latin text together with the present melody was probably in Ignaz Walter’s 1797 operatic setting of Doktor Faust.
From our side, we join the fervent wish of the ancients:
“Let us rejoice while we’re young!“
P.S. The Carmina Burana collection is now housed in the Bavarian State Library in Munich. We have no idea if it is open for public viewing. If someone knows, please share this information with our readers.
Featured image by Hans Braxmeier from Pixabay.
Related Articles: