Peter Schindler O Fortuna

Composer Peter Schindler on this separate edition from Perpetuum mobile:

“O Fortuna” (text no. 17 in the Codex Buranus) is a rhythmic strophic song. The text has been world famous since Carl Orff used it at the beginning of his work Carmina Burana in 1935. At the time it was still assumed that the manuscript began with this text and the miniature illumination of the Wheel of Fortune. This error was later corrected, when it was established that the original order of the manuscript's 112 parchment pages had been disturbed over the centuries.

The famous miniature of the wheel of fortune is decorated with a rhymed hexameter: “regnabo, regno, regnavi, sum sine regno” (I will rule, I rule, I have ruled, I am without dominion). This incisive illustration with Fortuna, the mistress of the world (Imperatrix mundi) in the center, was originally to be found in the middle of the group of moral-satirical poems.

In the poem, the rotating wheel of the goddess Fortuna is allegorically represented in the first stanza by the moon with its changing phases. By the next stanza the poem is already taking the form of a personal lament. In the third stanza there is a call to join in the grief over the unlucky fallen ones, a typical feature of laments. The accentuated and receding setting in a marking of allegro con bravura expresses the constant changes, circling, drifting and succeeding phases of world events.