Hildegard of Bingen, the Abbess Who Sang Her Visions
Nun, visionary and twelfth-century composer: the Symphonia, the Ordo Virtutum in which the devil cannot sing, and Hildegard's defence of sacred music.
In the landscape of medieval music, composers' names are rare: most liturgical chant is anonymous. Hildegard of Bingen is an extraordinary exception. Born in 1098 at Bermersheim, in the Rhineland, and dead on 17 September 1179 in the monastery of Rupertsberg, near Bingen, she was an abbess, writer, adviser to popes and emperors, and author of works of theology and natural science. She also left us a body of music whose author we know with certainty, one of the largest of the entire Middle Ages.
A Life Guided by Visions
While still a child, Hildegard was entrusted to Jutta of Sponheim, who lived as an anchoress at the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg. On Jutta's death, in 1136, she became leader of the women's community. According to what she herself wrote, she had received luminous visions since childhood, but only in 1141 did she feel commanded to write them down. Thus was born the Scivias, whose title means «know the ways», completed around 1151.
The work won the approval of Pope Eugene III, helped by the support of Bernard of Clairvaux. Around 1150 Hildegard founded a new monastery at Rupertsberg, on the bank of the Rhine opposite Bingen, and later a second one at Eibingen. She also wrote two books on natural and medical subjects, known as Physica and Causae et curae, which reflect the knowledge of her time, and invented an unknown language, the Lingua ignota, with its own alphabet.
The Symphonia and Heavenly Harmony
Hildegard's compositions are gathered in the Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum, the symphony of the harmony of heavenly revelations. It contains about seventy liturgical songs, among antiphons, responsories, hymns and sequences, devoted to the Virgin, the Holy Spirit, the saints and in particular to Saint Ursula and her companions. The texts are by Hildegard herself and abound in images of light, of flowers and of the life force she called viriditas, greenness.
The melodies differ from the more common Gregorian chant in their wide range, which often exceeds an octave, and in their long melismas, that is, many notes sung on a single syllable. The main manuscripts are the so-called Riesencodex, kept in Wiesbaden, and a codex now in Dendermonde, in Belgium. The Riesencodex, the «giant codex», gathers almost all her work in a single volume.
The Ordo Virtutum, Where the Devil Does Not Sing
Hildegard also composed the Ordo Virtutum, the Play of the Virtues, considered among the oldest morality plays whose music survives. It tells of the struggle for the human soul, fought over by the Virtues and the devil. The Virtues, led by Humility, all sing; the devil, by contrast, has no melody and can only speak or shout. For Hildegard music is a reflection of the divine order, and whoever has separated himself from God is shut out of it.
This conviction also emerges from a letter written shortly before her death. In 1178 her community was struck by an interdict, forbidding the singing of the office, for having buried a man held to be excommunicated. Hildegard wrote to the prelates of Mainz that liturgical music reminds humankind of the lost harmony of paradise. The interdict was lifted shortly before her death.
Venerated for centuries in Germany, Hildegard was proclaimed a saint for the universal Church and a Doctor of the Church by Benedict XVI in 2012. Since the 1980s recordings of her music have made her one of the most listened-to medieval composers in the world. Her figure unites mysticism, science and art in a rare way, and continues to attract scholars from many different disciplines.