O Fortuna!
Last night, I attended the Dallas Symphony Orchestra's performance (with the Dallas Symphony Chorus and the Children's Chorus of Greater Dallas) of Carl Orff's masterpiece Carmina Burana.(Click on the DSO link to hear the first song, O Fortuna or go here to access the program notes [click on "performances"].)
I've enjoyed Carmina Burana for years, but I'd never seen a translation of the medieval Latin, German, and French poetry that provide its lyrics--so I was amazed to learn that the whole cycle is built around the medieval concept of the Wheel of Fortune.
And trust me: Vanna White is soooo not a part of this worldview!
Just taste the lyric from Fortune plango vulnera (I bemoan the wounds of Fortune):
On Fortune's throne
I used to sit raised up,
crowned with
the many-coloured flowers of prosperity;
though I may have flourished
happy and blessed,
now I fall from the peak
deprived of glory.
The wheel of Fortune turns;
go down, demeaned;
another is raised up;
far too high up
sits the king at the summit -
let him fear ruin!
for under the axis is written
Queen Hecuba.
[A side note: My wife was amazed to learn that the chorus she'd always sung as, "Pork and beans! Pork and beans! Yes, I want some pork and beans!" is actually the grief of a spurned lover played out in medieval German.]
Anyway . . . the idea of life as a vast, ever-spinning wheel of fate was a philosophical concept championed by Boethius (480-524) and popularized by the character Ignatius Reilly in John Kennedy Toole's comic contemporary novel A Confederacy of Dunces.
Boethius believed that rational discourse and decision-making are vital to human success--even though they can't help us avoid the personal disasters of fate [not a surprising conclusion for a man who was imprisoned and executed, heh?].
What caught me in the Orff's lyrics--which are actually rather delightful, baudy poems and drinking songs discovered in a Benedictine monastery--was the view of the human (and of other creatures) as nearly void of agency.
The Wheel of Fate spins, and we only endure what comes our way--living fully in the moment the slings and arrows of fortune, including the height and depth of the emotions our fates evoke.
A Romantic concept to be sure . . . but not so far from today's popular culture, either.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Friday, May 14, 2004
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