Goliards of the 21st century

Carmina Burana is a collection of 12th- and 13th-century poems preserved in a codex found in 1830 in the Benedictine abbey of Beuren in the German region of Bavaria. The manuscript brings together nearly 300 songs of various geographical origins written in Vulgar Latin, German and French.

From their style and subject matter, most of the compositions seem to be the work of the Goliards: vagabond clerics and students who led a dissipated life and travelled like minstrels from place to place, drinking, playing and singing. Many of its members wrote satirical poetry, highly critical of the ecclesiastical institution, power and the established order, as well as songs praising earthly pleasures such as wine, taverns, love and carnal desire.

In the 1930s, the composer Carl Orff set some of the poems from the original codex to music, beginning with the best known of all: O Fortuna, velut luna statu variabilis [O Fortuna, you are variable like the moon].

In 2009 La Fura dels Baus was commissioned to adapt Orff's work "to create a total show". Its success has taken it to three continents and has been seen by more than 300,000 spectators. Now, fourteen years later, the story returns to Barcelona, to Teatre Tívoli. On stage, more than 50 performers and a large cylinder 10 metres in diameter envelop the orchestra, while the work is projected onto it from beginning to end. The result is a fast-paced sensorial, musical and theatrical montage in which none of the passages are missing: a giant moon, waterfalls of water and a burst of spring followed by a live grape harvest. And fire, lots of fire.

Tickets range from 20 to 58 euros and can be purchased online at this link.