O Fortuna topped a 2009 list of the most-played classical music of the previous 75 years in the United Kingdom. O Fortuna "O Fortuna" is a medieval Latin Goliardic poem written early in the 13th century, part of the collection known as the "Carmina Burana". It is a complaint about Fortuna, the inexorable fate that rules both gods and mortals in Roman and Greek mythology. In 1935–36, "O Fortuna" was set to music by German composer Carl Orff as a part of "", the opening and closing movement of his cantata "Carmina Burana". It was first staged by the Frankfurt Opera on
Carl Orff as "O Fortuna", from "Carmina Burana", is often used to denote primal forces, for example in the Oliver Stone film "The Doors". The work's association with fascism also led Pier Paolo Pasolini to use the movement "Veris leta facies" to accompany the concluding scenes of torture and murder in his final film "Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom". With the success of "Carmina Burana", Orff disowned all of his previous works except for "Catulli Carmina" and the "Entrata" (an orchestration of "The Bells" by William Byrd (1539–1623)), which were rewritten until acceptable by Orff. Later on, however, many of