Carl Orff

Carl Heinrich Maria Orff (ɔʁf; 10 July 1895 – 29 March 1982) was a German composer and music educator, best known for his cantata Carmina Burana (1937). The concepts of his Schulwerk were influential for children's music education. Carl Orff (full name Karl Heinrich Maria Orff) was born in Munich on 10 July 1895, the son of Paula Orff (née Köstler, 1872–1960) and Heinrich Orff (1869–1949). His family was Bavarian and was active in the Imperial German Army; his father was an army officer with strong musical interests, and his mother was a trained pianist. The composer's grandfathers, Carl von Orff (1828–1905) and Karl Köstler (1837–1924), were both major generals and also scholars. His paternal grandmother, Fanny Orff (née Kraft, 1833–1919), was Catholic of Jewish descent. His maternal grandmother was Maria Köstler (née Aschenbrenner, 1845–1906). Orff had one sibling, a younger sister named Maria ("Mia", 1898–1975), who married the architect Alwin Seifert (1890–1972) in 1924. Despite his family's military background, Orff recalled in 1970: "In my father's house there was certainly more music making than drilling." At age five, he began to play piano, and later studied cello and organ. He composed a few songs and music for puppet plays. He had two vignettes published in July 1905 in Das gute Kind, the children's supplement to Die katholische Familie. He began attending concerts in 1903 and heard his first opera (Richard Wagner's The Flying Dutchman) in 1909. The formative concerts he attended included the world premiere of Gustav Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde in 1911 and Richard Strauss conducting his opera Elektra on 4 June 1914. In 1910–12, Orff wrote several dozen Lieder on texts by German poets, including the song set Frühlingslieder (Opus 1, text by Ludwig Uhland) and the song cycle Eliland: Ein Sang von Chiemsee (Opus 12, text by Karl Stieler). The poet whose work he most frequently used was Heinrich Heine; he also chose texts of Walther von der Vogelweide, Princess Mathilde of Bavaria (1877–1906), Friedrich Hölderlin, Ludwig August Frankl, Hermann Lingg, Rudolf Baumbach, Richard Beer-Hofmann, and Börries von Münchhausen, among others.