He developed his theories on music pedagogy, trying to integrate his ideas into the music policies of the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth). Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Orff never either overtly or covertly resisted or opposed Nazi policies. There are also reports that Orff was a quarter Jewish, a fact that could only have added to his insecurities. He had many Jewish friends, including Kurt Weill and the poet Franz Werfel, and collaborated extensively with well-known Marxists like Brecht. Like many other artists of the time, Orff was considered a leftist. Nonetheless, his star was slowly rising by the early 1930s, when Hitler came to power and the reality of making music in Germany was to change dramatically. The young musician also collaborated briefly with Bertolt Brecht, and participated in the innovative new Bach Society in Munich, all of which solidified his reputation for being outside the mainstream, even avant-garde. Founded in 1927, it presented works by Bartók, Hindemith, Schoenberg and Stravinsky, among others. The composer maintained a life-long interest in music education.īy the late 1920s, Orff had established himself as a significant figure in the small but important modernist musical oasis in otherwise conservative Munich, the League for Contemporary Music. After several years of experimentation, sampling various musical career possibilities, Orff became a partner in the Munich Günther School, an educational institution that united music and movement. While still a teenager he enlisted, but returned home in 1917 after a near-lethal case of shell shock. His mother was an accomplished pianist who taught him when he was a child. Yet Orff managed to establish a place for himself and his music within Nazi Germany.Ĭarl Orff was born in 1895 into an upstanding Munich family of officers and scholars. As an artist, the odds seemed stacked against him when the Nazis came to power: it was expected that the composer would become yet another victim of the Third Reich’s oppressive cultural policies. Carl Orff remains something of an enigma in the musical history of Nazi Germany.
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