O Fortuna 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 8 June 1937. It opens at a slow pace with thumping drums and choir that drops quickly into
Carmina Burana fully completed the task. The ordering scheme used today was proposed in 1930 by Alfons Hilka and Otto Schumann in the first critical text edition of the "Carmina Burana". The two based their edition on previous work by Munich philologist Wilhelm Meyer, who discovered that some pages of the "Codex Buranus" had mistakenly been bound into other old books. He also was able to revise illegible portions of the text by comparing them to similar works. About one-quarter of the poems in the "Carmina Burana" are accompanied in the manuscript by music using unheighted, staffless neumes, an archaic system of