Nativity with Witches

The curtain rose on a heath full of shaggy, diabolical hags hurling harsh-mouthed imprecations into the night. Their wild language was a witches' brew of medieval Bavarian dialect, laced with great lumps of Latin and Greek; in the background, no fewer than 20 different percussion instruments fired the cauldron with a tingling, thwunking cacophony. Anyone wandering into Stuttgart's Opera House last week would have quickly recognized, in both words and music, the style of Germany's most highly regarded living composer, Carl (Carmina Burana) Orff, 65. Less obviously, the dark, demonic and shatteringly effective scene was the opening of a Christmas pageant.

Under a black sky, with the star of Bethlehem nowhere in sight, the witches were conjuring to prevent the birth of the Christ child. Then, as if by divine providence, they plummeted into the depths--via stage elevator. Five shepherds struggled across the snowy heath, settled in Brueghel postures around a fire, described their dreams in which angels told them (in Latin) of the Nativity. The scene was the heart of the pageant, but except for a roaring wind machine, the music had stopped completely; it was the ultimate development of a composer who has long since ceased writing for the concert hall, now considers "language power" and staging to be the prime effects of musical drama.

In the concluding minutes of the work, the distant heavenly host (on tape) ethereally sang what seemed to be an authentic, slightly dissonant Latin cantus, but was in fact one of Orff's own haunting evocations of the medieval spirit. Then a procession of children filed across the starlit snowscape and knelt in adoration, while the witches took a disheartened curtain call and skulked off as the head hag consoled: "Humans, if they are put up to it right, will crucify anybody."

In removing the Christmas legend from the tradition of sweetness and light, Orff had given all the good lines to the forces of darkness. When the witches were offstage, the hour-long pageant was static, lacked the exciting, full-blooded drama found in most of his work, including his Easter play, Comoedia de Christi Resurrectione. But the musical backgrounds were compelling, and the enthusiastic premiere audience demanded 15 curtain calls.

One critic called the pageant the paltry sum of "lemur-like witches from a melo drama, fur-clad shepherds from an amateur little theater, and small children from a club Christmas pageant." But other German critics found Orff's work magical, "full of simple poetry and totally pious."

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