FULL Trionfo di Afrodite & Carmina Burana (Orff) Tallinn 2012 Tatjana Kostina, Vladimir Tseberjak, Märt Jakobsen, Marion Melnik

Information on the Performance

• Work Title: Trionfo di Afrodite & Carmina Burana  
• Composer: Orff Carl  
• Libretto: wedding poems by Catullus, Sappho and Euripides    Libretto Text, Libretto Index
• Venue & Opera Company: Pirita Convent, Tallinn, Estonia, Birgitta Festival  
• Recorded: 2012
• Type: Staged Opera Live
• Singers: Tatjana Kostina, Vladimir Tseberjak, Märt Jakobsen, Marion Melnik, Oliver Kuusik, Jassi Zahharov
• Conductor: Mihhail Gerts, Erik Klas  
• Orchestra: Estonian National Symphony Orchestra  
• Chorus: Estonian National Opera's opera choir, Chamber choir Voces Musicales  
• Choreographer: Mai Murdmaa  
• Stage Director: Mai Murdmaa  
• Costume Designer:   

Information about the Recording

• Published by: Eesti TV  
• Date Published: 2013  
• Format: Broadcast
• Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
• Subtitles: nosubs  

• ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE

  Trionfo di Afrodite (Italian for Triumph of Aphrodite) is a cantata written in 1951 by the German composer Carl Orff. It is the third and final installment in the Trionfi musical triptych, which also includes Carmina Burana (1937) and Catulli Carmina (1943).

  Described by the composer himself as a concerto scenico (scenic concert), the Trionfo is a representation of a ritual for a Greco-Roman wedding, in a similar fashion to Igor Stravinsky’s Les noces. In this case, Trionfo refers to the Roman and Renaissance trionfo, meaning “procession” or “festival”. By using the word trionfo, Orff specifically intended to identify the work as a successor to the Renaissance and baroque tradition of the masque and pageant, not as a formal borrowing but as a rather refreshed and extended look on it.

  Orff began working on the Trionfo as early as 1947, but could not fully concentrate on the piece until he completed his Antigonae in March 1949. The score was finally completed in 1951 and premiered some time later, on February 14, 1953, at La Scala in Milan, with Herbert von Karajan conducting. Originally published in 1952 by B. Schott’s Söhne, it was reprinted by the original publisher in 1980 and again in 1990 by Ernst Eulenburg.

  The texts are based on Latin wedding poems by Catullus, as well as Greek poems by Sappho and a small part by Euripides. Catullus is Orff’s primary source of inspiration and guide in using both classical Latin and Greek text. Orff had already explored this in Catulli Carmina with Catullus’s Carmen 51, which is, in turn, an adaption of Sappho’s famous love poem 31. It is likely that it was the last call in Catulli Carmina’s Exodium, “Accendite faces!” (Light the torches!), that gave Orff the idea of using bridal torches in his new work and bringing the trionfo d’amore to its concluding climax, with a representation of a nuptial feast, as found in classical literature. Consequently, Orff decided to opt for Catullus’s 61 and 62, which mainly focuses on the topic of the nuptial feast. Both of these poems were originally written as an offering on the occasion of a patrician Roman couple. However, these poems were not intended to be sung, but should rather act as depictions of the event of marriage as such. Orff’s intentions with the text were not to offer an ad hoc reconstruction of an antique rite, but rather to present the union of an “archetypal couple as the work of the Goddess of Love Aphrodite, as a hieros gamos” (holy marriage). In this sense, the subtitle of the work, Concerto scenico, implies that there is a deliberate absence of plot, as opposed to the two preceding parts of the triptych.

  The challenge that faced me was to fuse these fragments into a new whole – the tiny particles, short stanzas or individual lines which are all that remain to us of Sappho’s poems, preserved in literature or protected by desert sands against the worms of time – and to use Catullus’ nuptial poems as framework for it.

  Despite the large orchestra, the instrumentation is often sparse, especially in the Greek verses, and the music is strongly influenced by the rhythms and melodies of the spoken word, though little importance is actually given to both tonic and prosodic accent. The piece closes with a triumphant apparition of Aphrodite herself, a rare instance when the full choral and orchestral forces are actually used.

  Quoted from Wikipedia

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