About the work
"Die Bernauerin" is a "Bavarian piece" by Carl Orff to his own text about the fate of Agnes Bernauer, a barber's daughter from Augsburg. Prompted by Friedrich Hebbel's drama of the same name and by old folk-song material, Orff wrote the text in an archaising fifteenth-century Bavarian dialect. It premiered on 15 June 1947 at the Württembergisches Staatstheater in Stuttgart.
Plot
Agnes Bernauer enters into a secret marriage, below her rank, with Duke Albrecht III of Bavaria. On the order of his father, Duke Ernst, she is dragged from her bed at night and brought before a court, then drowned in the Danube at Straubing while onlooking "witches" watch the spectacle.
Cultural significance
Musically marked by percussion-driven Sprechgesang, "Die Bernauerin" marks a turning point in Orff's output: it closes his early Bavarian creative phase while already pointing toward his later Greek dramas such as "Antigonae" and "Oedipus der Tyrann."