The legacies of Wagner and Nietzsche, German geniuses long dead before the advent of the Nazi scourge, still buckle under the taint. Festival destinations like Bayreuth and Oberammergau (home of the Passion Play) that long eluded denazification have, albeit only recently, embraced an ethos of reform. While these people and places were rightly seen as tenders of the flame of antisemitism, in no sense did they produce Nazi content. Yet “Carmina Burana,” an extraordinarily popular and recognizable work in the classical repertoire, has almost entirely evaded the “working through the past” conversation. Unlike those others, it is indisputably a text of the Nazi era, and while it may not qualify as “Nazi art,” as Anne-Charlotte Rémond of France Musique rightly put it, it was a work of art “made for Nazis.” The disproportion between the fame of “Carmina Burana” and the lack of deliberation on its troublesome origins demands a closer look.
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