Oh Yeah? Sez You.

There's no gainsaying another's personal response to a work of art no matter how benighted one may feel it to be. One can simply shake one's head, shrug one's shoulders, and move on.

Or write a blog post about it.

Blogger and Orange County Register classical music critic Tim Mangan of The Arts Blog has this to say about Carl Orff's Carmina Burana.

If I could grab hold of a piece of music and give it a life-ending chuck, I’d choose Carmina Burana. Why? Because its music is longwinded and repetitive, its mood is maudlin and manipulative, its view of life is (overly) sentimental and tragic. The Nazis loved it, too.

Oh yeah? Sez you. We say (and say in more detail here):

[We] confess to having an ongoing, undiminished, and fairly mindless fascination with Orff's Carmina Burana. Its unrelenting ostinati; its primitive, propulsive rhythmic drive; its unsubtle tonic-dominant harmony sans any trace of chromatic coloring — in short, its very "dumbness" — is what seems to attract. It's a sort of invigorating mind-rester: primally engaging, and no thought required.

[...]

One critic would have it that Carmina is "toxic" music that will make Nazis of all who succumb to its primitive charms. A more idiot notion can hardly be imagined, and no more attention should be paid it than should be paid the notion that one who is not master of his domain, to borrow the Seinfeldian locution, will go blind as consequence. And so what if Orff himself was a Nazi as has been alleged. If true, that's Orff's reputation's problem, not [ours] or yours — or Carmina's.

We're tempted to say more, but, then, what more can one say in response to the opinion of a professional classical music critic who, in respect of his above quoted comments on Carmina, thinks Wagner's Tristan und Isolde shares some of those same qualities, but escapes the same censure because "the music is way better"?

Not much.