Lyric Opera 2025-2026 Issue 6 - Carmina Burana

9 | Lyric Opera of Chicago This season has already been extraordinarily busy. What have preparations been like? The start to the season has been insane for us. We’ve been rehearsing nonstop every day, all day. We opened the season with Medea , a Lyric premiere which was a new opera for everyone in the Chorus — and for myself. Then came the double bill Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci , which was unfamiliar to a surprising number of members of the Chorus. It has a big scene for them — two big scenes! We were rehearsing Carmina Burana , which is another huge thing, as well as A Night of Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness , the big Smashing Pumpkins extravaganza in late November. I thought the Chorus would be involved in a few little items here and there, but the Chorus is onstage the entire time, singing 18 songs, three of them with Billy Corgan. So it’s been a great start to the season. This is the first time Lyric has performed Orff’s Carmina Burana , but it’s a widely known piece. What makes it so approachable? Whether it’s a Gatorade ad or an episode of How I Met Your Mother or Nas back in the 90s, rapping with Carmina Burana playing in the background — or watching The X Factor — everyone knows Carmina Burana on some level. Audiences probably won’t come out humming the tunes from Carmina Burana because Orff wrote it deliberately without melodic interest in mind. It’s driven purely by huge orchestral forces and driving rhythms — almost primitive primal rhythms — rather than beautiful melodies. You do get a couple of beautiful melodies. But even the opening that everyone knows only contains three or four notes; they’re just repeated in different iterations. So you come out humming three or four notes. But the rhythm, the huge percussion section and the hemiola (a rhythmic device where two groups of three beats are expressed as three groups of two beats, or vice versa) and the driving primitive rhythmic force is what people come out remembering. To hear it with an opera chorus of 100 and an orchestra almost mirroring that number as well is something that’s going to be quite remarkable. Hearing 100 of Chicago’s best opera singers brings it to an entirely different level. Does the piece present preparation challenges? Melodically, it’s not that riveting, but rhythmically and textually it is. Some of the greatest challenges in rehearsing this piece for a 21st-century chorus is the language itself. We’re looking at medieval German, 12th- and 13th-century Latin. Latin is a real challenge because no one quite knows how it’s pronounced. Every chorus director in the world thinks they know what it all means, but no one does. We make it up a little bit, and just make sure that everyone in the Chorus is doing exactly the same thing. So that’s a big challenge. Some people may have sung it elsewhere, and they’ve pronounced words slightly differently, but it’s the color of the text which is really important. When we started rehearsing with the tenors and basses, we went straight to the tavern scene, which is incredibly wordy — just word after word after word after word, never ending for about four minutes of this pitter patter of 13th-century German text. It’s great! It’s a lot of fun doing it, but it’s a real challenge for the Chorus. Can you talk a little bit about the history of Carmina Burana ? I find the history of this piece really fascinating. It was a huge success at Frankfurt Opera in 1937, and Orff immediately wrote to his publisher and said, “Now you can destroy everything I have previously created and you have unfortunately printed.” He knew it was a success. He knew how important this piece was. The 25 poems that are set within this piece are really fascinating because they talk about love and fortune, and how fickle both can be. Look at the picture that these poems are based on, which is Rota Fortunae — the wheel of fortune. We start with fortune being really fickle, and we move through spring, and the meadow, and the tavern, and this love story, and we come back to fortune at the end. So this was the original wheel of fortune. Orff was really obsessed with the simplicity of music. So it’s not about complex counterpoint or fugal writing or layers of orchestra writing. It’s just primitive forces presenting primitive rhythms, and text which was meaningful during the medieval period, but Orff is saying the messages are just as meaningful to us today: fortune, love, nature, religion — both sides of religion. Fascinatingly, we talk about all these things in this one hour of music. These poems cover a wide range of topics. Do you think it’s important for the audience to understand the context and the stories that are being told in order to enjoy the music? Carmina Burana is one of these pieces where you can just sit there, shut your eyes, and let the music wash over you — all the sounds and colors. Or, you can look