Carl Orff's O Fortuna in popular culture Carl Orff's O Fortuna in popular culture In 1935–36, the 13th-century poem "O Fortuna" was set to music by the German composer Carl Orff for his twenty-five-movement cantata "Carmina Burana". The composition appears in numerous films and television commercials and has become a staple in popular culture, setting the mood for dramatic or cataclysmic situations. For instance, it is used to portray the torment of Jim Morrison's drug addiction in the film "The Doors." In 1983, Doors' keyboardist Ray Manzarek released his third solo album, "Carmina Burana", which is an interpretation of the piece in a contemporary framework. "O Fortuna"
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