But the Latin isn’t the proper, correct version of the language that we learn in school. They were primarily written in Latin, with a sprinkling of German and French thrown in, too Latin was still the established language of instruction and scholarship, and the international language of Europe. The text comes from a series of poems/lyrics written in the 11th and 12th centuries, which were gathered together into a single collection at the Benedictine monastery of Benediktbeuern in Bavaria. So, what are the problems with it? For one, the language is really, really bizarre. This experience brought me up close and personal with the text, and gave me a renewed respect for the difficulties of translating it to English-and the incredible wit of its original authors. The powers that be agreed, and I note that many years later, it’s still the one the Orchestra prints in the Showcase magazine (I’m also attaching it as text below). And so while I was still working as a staff writer for the Minnesota Orchestra, I asked for a chance to put together a translation of my own. Poetry is always tricky to translate, and Carmina Burana is particularly troublesome. I would never have believed back in middle school that it would be more of my signature works!īut as we started routinely performing it, something started to irritate me-the translations of it were atrocious. And as a burgeoning singer, I fervently hoped that one day I might finally have a chance to actually sing it.Īt this point, all my friends and colleagues in the Minnesota Chorale are laughing uproariously-it is a rare year that we don’t perform it. In my adolescent mind, that was the coolest work ever written, one that always made my hair stand on end. The powerful opening chorus, “O Fortuna,” is something you hear all the time, and by mid-adolescence I quickly recognized it as the Big Dramatic Scary Music Piece that meant something really bad-ass was about to happen. To begin I want to step back and say a few words about how I came to love the work and its joyous wordplay. They are surprisingly intelligent-and very much worth getting to know. It may surprise you to hear that one of the reasons I enjoy the work so immensely is the wonderful, sardonic wit of its lyrics. I’ve dealt with the work in many ways, over many years, and I wanted to say a few words about it that might help put it in a different light. In fact its popularity has frequently raised the hackles of classical music aficionados, who often look down on it as being an adolescent work-a primal scream with no depth or real interest. By considering the rubrics of creation, fall, and redemption – as Thomas does – we find that our resources for analyzing the passions are greatly enriched.Carmina Burana is one of the world’s most popular works of classical music, and has been used in everything from commercials and campaign ads to movie trailers and football commentary. One upshot of this approach for Thomists is that it sharpens our vocabulary when describing human nature and the conditions for the moral life. As I argue in this essay, Thomas’s writings on Christ’s human affectivity should not be limited to the concerns of Christology rather, they should be integrated into a fuller account of the human passions. Yet these accounts have paid inadequate attention to Thomas’s writings on Christ’s passions as a source of moral reflection. Link to free access "read-only" version: In recent scholarship, moral theologians and readers of Thomas Aquinas have shown increasing sensitivity to the role of the passions in the moral life. In doing so, it provides a partial but substantial genealogy of an important heuristic taxonomy in the history of emotions, while suggesting that the philosophical import of the distinction in the eighteenth century owes something to rhetorical and poetic traditions which are often not considered by historians of philosophy. This article examines the long history of the distinction between calm and violent, or mild and vehement, emotions from the classical Roman rhetorical tradition through the Renaissance and into the modern period. Abstract: While the distinction between the calm and violent passions has been treated by Hume scholars from a number of perspectives relevant to the Scottish philosopher’s thought more generally, little scholarly attention has been paid to this distinction either in the works of Hume’s non-English contemporaries (e.g., the French Jesuit Pierre Brumoy) or in the long rhetorical and literary tradition which often categorized the emotions as either calm or violent.
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