Carmina Burana

Tickets for Carmina Burana at the Arena di Verona

The Arena of Verona will pay homage to Ezio Bosso with the monumental symphonic and choral concert of Carmina Burana on August 12th, exactly three years after his concert in the Arena, for a single extraordinary date. Buy your official tickets now before they sell out.

On Friday, August 12th, Carmina Burana, a great fresco of medieval poetry in music, will resound for the third time among the ancient stones of the Arena. One of the most enthralling and evocative repertoires of the classical panorama, transversally popularized by cinema and television to the point of being well known even to the general public in its moments of greatest expressive power, Carmina Burana was presented for the first time in the Arena with undisputed success in 2014 and 2015 and in 2019 by Maestro Ezio Bosso.

The 24 pieces set to music by Orff, mostly in Latin, some in Old High German and one in Provençal, are taken from a collection of medieval poetic texts from the 11th and 12th centuries found in the Bavarian monastery of Benediktbeuern, near Bad Tölz in Bavaria, and handed down from an important manuscript contained in an illuminated codex from the 13th century, the Codex Latinus Monacensis 4550 or Codex Buranus: hence the term Carmina Burana, introduced in 1847 by the scholar Johann Andreas Schmeller on the occasion of the first publication of the manuscript. Therefore a text that well reflects the birth of the polyglot and internationalist spirit of the Imperial and Byzantine Middle Ages at the end of the first dark centuries after the fall of the Western Empire, and therefore perfect for the deeply international audience of the Veronese summer, a real melting pot of infinite nationalities united by a common desire for music and entertainment. But also a magniloquent musical text, perfect for the imposing scenery of the Arena, which naturally leads the scenic cantata to a dimension of grandeur that only the magnificence of the Amphitheatre can achieve.

The Carmina Burana, also known as Codex Buranus or the Beuern songs, are a collection of Goliard songs from the 12th and 13th centuries, collected in the manuscript found in Benediktbeuern (Bura, in Latin), Germany, in the 19th century and made famous by the composer Carl Orff’s cantata of the same name.