Wilf: How Carmina’s ‘Biryani’ struck a chord with me

Jun 27 2009 By Wilf Lunn

We went to Woods Music shop and I asked Dick what the recording was called. He said: “ Mum says it’s called Carmen Biryani”.

I’d heard of Carmen by Bizet and I was very familiar with Carmen Jones, a rewritten film version, which I’d seen many times having once been a film projectionist. I also knew Carmen Miranda but I’d never heard of Carmen Biryani. Neither had Woods. I glanced at the display and spotted a recording Carmina Burana.

“She’s got to mean that,” I said to Dick and it turned out to be right.

Carmina Burana has a beginning and end piece called O Fortuna, which was made famous because it was used in the Old Spice aftershave advert.

When I heard Slaithwaite Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus were doing a performance of Carmen Biryani, sorry, Carmina Burana at the town hall, I thought that’s a must for me and I wasn’t disappointed: it was a terrific show. It made the hairs stand up on the back of your neck.

I particularly watched the triangle player. Unlike me at school he had a go on other instruments including the big drum. The soloists were a joy to listen to. I really enjoyed the very expressive counter tenor singing Cignus ustus cantat translated it means ‘the roast swan’. It’s about a complaining blackened spit-roasted swan.

The whole thing is based on medieval poems in a mixture of Dog Latin, German and French. This mixed language is now called Macaronic. I first heard of it in the film of Umberto Eco’s book The Name of the Rose. Where William of Baskerville’s apprentice Adso Melk asks what language the hunchback Salvatore is speaking, he answers: “All languages and none”.

Macaronic can be quite amusing as when a judge trying to appear a linguist speaking to a convicted French murderer says:

“Vous avez tuer three men mort.”