O Fortuna

You've all heard  O Fortuna, though you may not know that you have.  This medieval poem was set to music by Carl Off in the 1930s.  The poem itself is a rather grim, even angry, description of the goddess Fortune.  Set to music, it is an ominous, and then thundering, condemnation of the vagaries of cruel Fate and the life we're made to live while on Earth.

The pagan goddess Fortune was, no doubt, cursed from time to time, though my guess is more effort was devoted to placating her than cursing her.  In this poem, though, we have what I think is a very Christian work, consumed as it seems to be by hate and despair of Fate in the kingdom of this world.  Life on earth, after all, is almost by definition inclined to evil, as are we, or so it was thought by the Church when this poem was written.

You've probably heard it in various movies and perhaps even during a TV show, used to render a scene portentous, or comical when heard during something silly and it's used to mock.  I remember thinking it might be something of Wagner's when it was played during the movie Excalibur along with Siegfried's Funeral March and bits of Parsifal and Tristan and Isolde.  Oddly, it was played during a scene when Arthur and his knights road out to face Mordred, and the country was coming alive in spring blossoms with the return of the king.

We might think it appropriate as part of the soundtrack of our times, when everyone weeps with us.  A Stoic of the ancient past might think life, however changeable and hurtful, was only seemingly so, and evil only in the limited view allowed us as the kind of creatures that we are.  What the Universal Reason dictates is beyond us, but necessarily good.  A more modern version of a Stoic might have no trust in a spirit of intelligence motivating the universe, but would aspire as would the ancient Stoic to recognize that it is foolish to allow what is beyond our control to disturb us and be content to govern ourselves if not events.

Governing ourselves, thinking of us as a group of any kind, seems beyond our power these days, however.  The tendency is not to do so, in fact, but to leave that to someone else, provided only that our governor seem to be not only powerful but a panderer, playing up to us and gratifying our increasingly material and simple, meaning baser, desires.  It seems we'd be content with very little, really.  Perhaps it's always been so, in the end.  Food, shelter, entertainment and the sense that we're better than others are all that are needed to make us content, Fortune be damned.  

Those of medieval times may have felt that they were responsible for the evils inflicted on them by the world, or God.  Many of us no longer think that way.  We're more inclined to blame others, not Fortune or Fate. Others make us angry, and are much more easily punished than Fate, or Fortune or God.  We don't bemoan our fate, we make others bemoan their fate.  But the soundtrack of our angry, vengeful time may still include O Fortuna for its effect if not its meaning.