Orpheus (3rd version, 1940) / Klage der Ariadne for Mezzo-soprano & Orchestra (2nd version, 1940)

»You are the born music dramatist; your field is the stage. Go to study with the first music dramatist.« Curt Sachs, the then head of the State Collection of Musical Instruments, gave this advice to the young Carl Orff and thus set him out on a path that would lead to intensive occupation with Monteverdi. Although centuries separated the two composers, Orff immediately felt an affinity for this Italian master of the early Baroque: »I found a music that was so familiar to me that it was as if I had long known it, as if I had rediscovered it. It was an inner agreement that moved me very much and let the new open up in me.« It was against this background that Orff produced his versions of three works by the early Monteverdi during the years from 1923 to 1941. Orff later called this period his »years of apprenticeship with Monteverdi,« explaining that it had not been his intention to produce »a historical arrangement« but to find »my own style with reference to a masterpiece of the past.«