Music

Hildegard of Bingen

c. 1098–1179 · German

Medieval monophony — the Rhineland abbess-visionary

Hildegard of Bingen was a Benedictine abbess, visionary, medical writer and composer of the Rhineland, and more music survives under her name than under that of any other medieval composer. Her chant abandons the modest range of ordinary plainsong for enormous leaps and ecstatic melismas, and her sung morality play is the earliest surviving example of its kind. She was made a Doctor of the Church in 2012, one of only four women to hold the title.

How to spot them

▸A single unaccompanied vocal line, but with a range far wider than ordinary plainchant — melodies vault over an octave and a half and spin long melismas on one syllable
▸Latin texts she wrote herself, packed with green, growing imagery: branches, sap, dew, viridity (viriditas, her own coinage for the life-force)
▸Questions pair her with the words 'Sibyl of the Rhine', the abbey at Rupertsberg near Bingen, and her secretary-monk Volmar
▸She is the only medieval composer who is also a named authority on migraine, gemstones and the medicinal use of spelt

Key works — listen

A sung morality play in which sixteen Virtues and a shouting, tone-deaf Devil fight over a wandering soul (c. 1151)

Ordo Virtutum — the earliest surviving morality play, and the only one with music; the Devil alone cannot sing and must bellow his lines

An antiphon hailing the Virgin as a leafy green branch in whom salvation put out its shoots (c. 1150)

O frondens virga — a short antiphon that shows her viriditas imagery at its plainest

Recording: User:Makemi · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons

The gathered cycle of her seventy-seven liturgical chants, whose title calls them the harmony of heavenly revelations (c. 1140–1160)

Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum — antiphons, responsories, hymns, sequences and a Kyrie

A record of twenty-six visions begun in 1141, read aloud and approved at the Synod of Trier by Pope Eugenius III (1151)

Scivias (Sci vias Domini, 'Know the ways of the Lord') — the book that made her reputation

A compendium of the healing properties of plants, stones, fish and beasts, written by an abbess with no medical training (c. 1150)

Physica — paired with Causae et Curae, it makes her the best-known medical writer of the German 12th century

A late book of ten cosmic visions in which the universe is an egg and the human body its microcosm (1163–1174)

Liber Divinorum Operum ('Book of Divine Works')

An invented private language of around a thousand nouns, written in an alphabet of twenty-three unknown letters (c. 1150)

Lingua ignota and Litterae ignotae — possibly the earliest constructed language on record

Key ideas

Viriditas — 'greenness' or greening power, her word for the divine life-force running through creation, health and holiness alike
Music as the echo of the song Adam knew before the Fall, so that silencing a choir is a spiritual injury, not an administrative one
The human being as a microcosm, the body's health mirroring the order of the cosmos

Quick-fire facts

•She was the tenth child of a noble family and given to the Church as a tithe, enclosed as an anchorite with Jutta of Sponheim at the Disibodenberg while still a girl
•She said she had seen visions since the age of three but did not begin writing them down until about 1141, aged forty-two
•Pope Eugenius III read from Scivias at the Synod of Trier in 1147–48, which gave her visions official sanction
•She founded her own monastery at the Rupertsberg near Bingen in about 1150, and a daughter house at Eibingen
•She undertook four preaching tours in the 1160s, extraordinary for a woman of her era, preaching publicly in Trier, Cologne and Werden
•She and her convent were placed under interdict late in her life for burying an excommunicate in consecrated ground; her protest was that the ban silenced her nuns' singing
•Her music survives chiefly in two manuscripts: the Dendermonde Codex (c. 1174–75) and the Riesencodex, the 'giant codex' of Wiesbaden (c. 1180–85)
•Pope Benedict XVI canonised her by equivalent canonisation in May 2012 and named her a Doctor of the Church that October — one of only four women so named
•Her descriptions of shimmering, fortified lights have been read by modern neurologists, including Oliver Sacks, as migraine aura
•The 2009 Margarethe von Trotta film Vision stars Barbara Sukowa as Hildegard

Drill it — 9 cards

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Sources

International Society of Hildegard von Bingen Studies — The Music of Hildegard von Bingen
Encyclopaedia Britannica — Hildegard of Bingen
Sabina Flanagan — Hildegard of Bingen: A Visionary Life