(choral work, c. 1151)
We know little about most of the composers of music written during the Middle Ages, a time that is generally shrouded in anonymity. Interestingly, especially considering the lower cultural status of women during this period, Hildegard of Bingen is one of the few composers of the medieval period we can identify by name. Perhaps that is because of her forceful personality and unique accomplishments. Or maybe it is because her music has unique qualities that make it seem so far ahead of its time.
One of her most important works, Ordo Virtutum or The Play of the Virtues, is the first musical drama in history, an allegorical morality play set to music that explores the power of the virtues (love, chastity, obedience, and so forth) to rescue and transform the lost and struggling human soul. It is one of the earliest examples of a morality play, a genre that would only become common later, in the fourteenth century, and whose best-known example is Everyman. In a morality play, each character is a personification of a concept, a virtue, or a vice.
So in Hildegard’s drama, a morality play set to music, a lost soul is led to salvation by the work of the virtues, each of whom offers a solo song, and each of whom is praised in turn by a chorus of the other virtues. The devil (the only part designed for a male soloist, whose part is spoken or shouted rather than sung) futilely attempts to woo her back, but in the end he is bound and defeated by the strength of the combined virtues. At its conclusion, this chorus of virtues joins their voices together in praise to God. Hildegard undoubtedly meant it to be a teaching lesson in song for the nuns under her charge, but it is also a musical composition of great emotional impact.
Hildegard’s music is generally much more dramatic than the typical chant of her times, with soaring and leaping and swirling melodies, deeply expressive emotion, and a wide sonic range. It is characterized by both rich sensuousness and purity of sound, as though she were trying to bring heaven and earth together in her music. Melodic phrases are stretched and contracted to create the soaring arches of sound that typify her style and make most other contemporary chant seem mild-mannered and stately when set beside Hildegard’s richly expressive compositions. Hildegard’s musical expressiveness was also reflective of her personal style. She was a woman who loved beautiful clothing, fragrant scents, and shimmering gemstones. She would, on occasion, even allow the nuns under her care to dress themselves in more extravagant costumes than were normally allowed for cloistered women, or allow them to let their hair grow long and remain uncovered, sometimes even crowned with flowers.
Hildegard of Bingen was born in 1098 to noble parents at Bermersheim in the Rhineland, the youngest of ten children. As was common at the time, this tenth child was offered as a tithe to the church when she was eight years old and sent to the Benedictine monastery at Disibodenberg. Trained by the small community of nuns there, she joined the religious life and learned how to recite and sing the Latin Psalter. When the abbess died, Hildegard, who had already shown herself to be a natural leader, was chosen as her successor.
Throughout her life, beginning in her youth, Hildegard experienced powerful spiritual visions. She described them as an experience of light: “Heaven was opened and a fiery light of exceeding brilliance came and permeated my whole brain and enflamed my whole heart and my whole breast.”1 Shortly after she became abbess, she was instructed in one of these visions to “tell and write what she saw and heard.” She did so with a book entitled Scivias or Know the Ways of the Lord. The content of these visions was considered orthodox enough that her visions were endorsed by the influential spiritual writer Bernard of Clairvaux and by Pope Eugenius III. Her visions used the language of nature and mysticism to expound upon Christian truths with rich and beautifully adorned imagery, emphasizing gardens, flowers, trees, and other natural phenomena that represented fecundity and growth.
Hildegard saw the processes of nature as an apt metaphor for what needed to happen in every individual human soul—a process she referred to as “greening.” She saw the world as the stage for an intense spiritual battle between good and evil, and the “greenness” was a reflection of celestial spiritual light. Humanity existed either in a state of greening and growing or a state of dryness and aridity, and it was only in the light of God that it was possible to find the water to slake our spiritual thirst. Like so many Christian artists, Hildegard was a nature mystic, seeing God at work in his created world. “All living creatures are sparks from the radiation of God’s brilliance,” she wrote, “and these sparks emerge from God like the rays of the sun. . . . God cannot be seen but is known through the divine creation, just as our body cannot be seen because of our clothing.”2 For Hildegard, both light and the beauty of nature were pointers to the divine reality.
In a time when women were restricted from participating in leadership and teaching roles, sharing her personal visions as a “mouthpiece” of God was the only way Hildegard could get a hearing, and so these visions were a socially sanctioned way to press beyond the normal constraints placed upon medieval women and allow her to be seen as a genuine religious leader.
Hildegard also painted pictures of what she had seen in her visions, which she called “Illuminations.” Though the originals were apparently destroyed in WWII, we have faithful copies created by later Germanic nuns. These paintings are complex, mysterious, quite beautiful, and filled with the symbolism of her personal vision of God and his relationship to his creation.
In addition to recording her visions in books and paintings, Hildegard also wrote books in which she related her careful observations of the natural world—books on biology, botany, and herbal medicine. She also wrote numerous letters, many of which survive, offering practical spiritual counsel and sometimes even political advice to secular leaders. In these letters Hildegard was fearless in speaking of her contempt for religious hypocrisy, and she raised her voice against abuses among the clergy with all the self-assurance of a prophet.
In addition to Ordo Virtutum, she also composed seventy-seven songs for use in various parts of the mass and Daily Office, known collectively as the Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations or, more simply, as Symphonia. These draw on texts from the Bible, her unique theological ideas, and stories from the lives of the saints. Whether through writing music, penning books, or painting her visions, Hildegard wanted the nuns under her care to better understand their relationship with God, their heavenly Husband and Father. The idea of the “spiritual marriage” between God and the virginal nun was a common theme throughout her writings and music.
Raised in a monastic environment where music (mostly in the form of chant) helped order and structure the day, Hildegard held a deep regard for the power of music to balance and order the human soul. Music was an essential part of the monastic community, as monks and nuns spent literally hours each day singing the Daily Office. Hildegard saw this kind of music as transformative, nothing less than a spiritual discipline, a way to recenter a soul that had fallen out of sync with God. Music, she believed, redirected our attention and focus and brought us back into connection with him. She used the term symphonia to speak of the harmony achieved when voices blended together—an inner harmony mirrored by the unity felt when our voices are lifted with others in song. For Hildegard, music was such an effective metaphor for the deepest transcendent realities that she used musical terminology over three hundred times throughout her writings to illuminate truths about the spiritual life.
Yet with all her accomplishments, Hildegard did not see herself as an exalted person, but only as a humble spokesperson for God. She referred to herself as “a small trumpet” and a “feather on the breath of God.”3 Through her music, her writings, and her paintings, Hildegard called people to find the balance and harmony of a life dedicated to God. She died in 1179, and was largely forgotten until her work was rediscovered and newly translated in the late 1970s, as the modern environmental movement came into full flower. Many readers and listeners today find this medieval nun a fresh and still-relevant voice speaking to the concerns of our modern times.