Like Nessun Dorma, this aria is very accessible to the pop,
post-modern ear, very exciting, rock-and-roll-like.
"O Fortuna", set to music by Carl Orff in 1936, is a medieval Latin Goliardic poem written early in theThirteenth Century, part of the collection known as the Carmina Burana ("Songs from Beuern","Beuern" being short for Benediktbeuern, the Benedictine monastery in Bavaria where the collection was found in 1803. The song is the opening movement of Orff's musical composition Carmina Burana. It's a complaint about fate and Fortuna, a goddess in Roman mythology and the personification of luck.
O Fortune,
like the moon
you are changeable,
ever waxing
and waning;
hateful life
first oppresses
and then soothes
as fancy takes it;
poverty and power
it melts them like ice.
Fate – monstrous
and empty,
you whirling wheel,
you are malevolent,
well-being is vain
and always fades to nothing,
shadowed and veiled
you plague me too;
now through the game
I bring my bare back
to your villainy.
Fate is against me
in health and virtue,
driven on
and weighted down,
always enslaved.
So at this hour
without delay
pluck the vibrating strings;
since Fate
strikes down the strong man,
everyone weep with me!
like the moon
you are changeable,
ever waxing
and waning;
hateful life
first oppresses
and then soothes
as fancy takes it;
poverty and power
it melts them like ice.
Fate – monstrous
and empty,
you whirling wheel,
you are malevolent,
well-being is vain
and always fades to nothing,
shadowed and veiled
you plague me too;
now through the game
I bring my bare back
to your villainy.
Fate is against me
in health and virtue,
driven on
and weighted down,
always enslaved.
So at this hour
without delay
pluck the vibrating strings;
since Fate
strikes down the strong man,
everyone weep with me!
