This Wild Darkness: Why Everything They Told You About Carmina Burana Is Wrong

First Tim Mangan.

Now Jessica Duchen.

Vos quoque!

Poor Carl Orff takes -- again -- one for the team, and Carmina Burana endures the billionth slam of its merrily barbaric existence -- to make matters worse, Jessica went to some crazy Cirque De Soleil-like extravaganza where they staged for 14,000 unhappy people some sort of operatic version of Carmina Burana in a suburban London spiky gasometer (and they wonder why it sucked). Which is a bit like going to a Dante reading at the Indy 500 races, where the poetry is actually read backwards, in a whisper, right next to the deafening noise of the pit.

Bad staging ideas aside, the problem with Orff's masterpiece -- and OC refuses to believe its consistently bad press is related to the composer's Nazism, because frankly, bad man as he was, at least, unlike the much-worshipped, much more douchebaggy Wagner, Orff didn't devote much of his life's work to put into music all the various reasons why the Jew is a foreign, evil presence that pollutes Germany's Aryan heart -- the problem with Orff seems to Opera Chic to stem from an essential error in the work's perception (and also by the fact that CB, let's admit it, technically is a deceitful, incredibly difficult work and has been mostly conducted badly -- Opera Chic can only think of two or three recordings, one of them unofficial, that make Carmina Burana sound like it should).