If this is to be believed, maybe we don't.

When I think of the 'problem' of Carmina Burana I am reminded, among other things, of the quotation from Schopenhauer that Orff's countryman and contemporary, Hans Pfitzner used in the preface to the score of his opera 'Palestrina':

"Alongside world history there goes, guiltless and unstained by blood, the history of philosophy, science and the arts."

One might have thought that the events of the last century in particular might make us pause to consider the efficacy of these words, but, hey, 'classical music' is not called 'classical' for nothing---we seem to relate to it as if it really were always already timelessly (and thus a-historically) great.

Martin Kettle's review of the Secret of the White Rose concludes that "the musical establishment may continue to agonise over the important question of whether a bad man can produce a great piece of work, or whether Orff's sub-Stravinskyan ostinatos are an explicit homage to the ethnic paganism in which the Nazis wallowed. But the musical public decided long ago that it has no such inhibitions." Well, I am not sure what he means by 'musical establishment'--if he means musicologists, they are hardly 'establishment' at least in so far as wielding any substantial cultural authority. It is true though, I suspect that music academics do make a point of considering such issues in their classes and in their textbooks. Nevertheless, if the public-at-large really doesn't care, then one has to ask, to what effect?

Or, rather, does it matter? Well, I, for one, would stick my neck out and say, for instance, there is, arguably, a functional simularity between the gradious repetitive rhythms of Orff's most popular work, and the grandious repetitive forms of Albert Speer's Cathedrals of Light which he designed for Nuremburg Rallys of the Nazi party in the 1930s. And we ought to be able to hear such music with an ear to such historically-informed aesthetic judgments.