Carmina Burana

This performance has been staged during the Opera Festival 2019. Visit the program page to see what's scheduled for the next Opera Festival!

Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana will be performed on August 11^th 2019, the great musical fresco of medieval poetry is back for the third time within the Arena Amphitheatre’s antique stone walls.

The 24 poems set to music by Orff, mainly in Latin, but also including some in Old High German and one in Provençal, are taken from a collection of 11^th and 12^th century Medieval poems discovered in the monastery of Benediktbeuern, near Bad Tölz in Bavaria, and handed down through time thanks to an important manuscript contained in a 13^th century illuminated manuscript, the Codex Latinus Monacensis 4550 or Codex Buranus: hence the title Carmina Burana, introduced in 1847 by scholar Johann Andreas Schmeller on the occasion of the manuscript’s first publication.