Carmina Burana is undoubtedly the most celebrated work by the German composer Carl Orff, and is inspired by a collection of around 300 poems/songs written by clergymen and bum students from the 12th and 13th centuries, who led a dissolute life, outside the rules.

Thus, in 1937, he composed a scenic cantata that bears the same name as the literary original and whose best-known fragment is O Fortuna.

The poems, written mostly in Latin, include love songs, tavern songs, satires, student songs, but they all constitute a song of love and carnal pleasures, a position that clashes directly with the conception traditionally attributed to the medieval.