Composer of the Month
The 12th-century nun’s influential work represents an important development in the history of music, says Fiona Maddocks
Fiona Maddocks on polymath Hildegard von Bingen
You may think there were many people called Hildegard von Bingen: the one who catalogued the animals, birds, fish, plants, trees and precious metals of her native German Rhineland; the one whose medical theories are still valued by holistic therapists today; the one who invented her own, mysterious language of 900 words, its intention a continuing debate among scholars. Perhaps more famous is the writer, theologian and abbess, whose bold, arresting visions – many depicted in illuminated manuscripts – reflected her own fervent beliefs; who founded her own monastery; who stood up to monks, bishops, popes and emperors across Europe, the scourge of a corrupt Church, earning her the name ‘Sibyl of the Rhine’.
Finally, there is Hildegard the musician: one of the first named composers and the woman who concerns us here. We cannot separate these strands of Hildegard’s long and eventful life any more than she could herself. In certain respects, her biography is well documented. The facts we know give us vital context to grasp how a barely educated woman could move so relatively freely in the highest echelons of medieval life. However, frustratingly little is known about her musical interests or practice (more on that later).
Hildegard was born in Alzey in the wine-growing region of Rheinhessen in 1098, though with an almost mystical respect for the harmony of round numbers, she herself recorded the date as 1100. Her parents were land owners, middle-ranking but not grand. Likely to have been the tenth child, she was given as a tithe to the church, either at eight or 14. Immediately, her childhood acquires fascination. The habit of donating a child, a voluntary form of tax, was relatively common, but Hildegard had already proved herself an exception. At a young age, and throughout her life, she had visions, believed to be sent from God.
These set her apart, in every sense. (In our own time, the British neurologist Oliver Sacks suggested these visions, which were accompanied by severe, debilitating physical symptoms, were akin
Political and religious life in 12th-century Europe had a direct impact on Hildegard
to migraines.) Wrenched from her family, she was enclosed as an anchoress with another well-born, older girl, Countess Jutta von Sponheim – they lived in a cell alongside, but segregated from, monks in the hillside abbey of Disibodenberg. The idea of anchorage was to be ‘buried’ from the world and rise again in immortality through sequestration and prayer. This would be Hildegard’s home, and mode of existence, for more than three decades.
Remote though this existence sounds, political and religious life in 12th-century Europe had a direct impact on Hildegard. It was the time of Crusades, pilgrimage, cathedral building; the era of the grand monasteries of Cluny, religious fervour – and attendant profiteering and abuse of power by clergy. Monastic life, in its timetable of work and prayer, was yoked to the Rule of St Benedict.
Yet monasteries were also places of learning, and of refuge for travellers and the sick: monks and nuns were secluded from the world, but the world came to them. Women, for a brief period in history, could hold a fair degree of power. (This would diminish by the end of Hildegard’s life, when universities, closed to women, began to flourish.)
Hildegard’s full story, rich in episode and colour, can only be told here in highlights. A turning point was the death of Jutta, who had given her a rudimentary education, perhaps in music as well as Latin. A number of other young women (and their all-too-useful dowries) having arrived at the anchorage in the intervening years, Hildegard now succeeded Jutta as abbess. By now she was in her 40s, with a growing sense of purpose. She began to write her best-known theological work, Scivias (or Know the Way), assisted by her secretary and friend, the monk Volmar. Moreover she also, according to the Vita Sanctae Hildegardis (Life of St Hildegard) written by two monks during and after her lifetime, began composing music for the first time – for her nuns to sing as part of the Divine Office.
Causing some shock among her colleagues, Hildegard left Disibodenberg and founded her own monastery at Rupertsberg, on the banks of the Rhine, where it meets the river Nahe, at Bingen. Now, as then, one of the Rhine’s busiest junctions, it was a canny choice. She wanted more room and prominence.
The wealthy families who gave their daughters to the church wanted greater comfort and physical protection. It was the start of radically different stage of life, in which she travelled throughout Europe, met leading figures of the day, debated, sermonised and wrote hundreds of letters (which have survived, and now exist in a modern edition).
Leaving this public identity aside, what can we say of Hildegard’s music? This, above all, has given her lasting fame. Mostly ignored by music textbooks and dictionaries as well as performers until late in the last century – a fate common to most female composers – she was resurrected thanks to various early-music pioneers. In 1979, director Philip Pickett and the New London Consort were among the first to revive her music. And borrowing its title from a line in Scivias, the best-selling 1985 A Feather on the Breath of God recording by Gothic Voices, directed by the scholarmusician Christopher Page, transformed
Hildegard’s modern reputation. Important recordings by Barbara Thornton and Sequentia, Anonymous 4 and others are central to Hildegard’s story.
Music in her time was perceived as the mirror of divine order. Before the Fall, Adam’s voice was in tune with the natural harmony of the cosmos, the Music of the Spheres. As Hildegard wrote: ‘For, before he sinned, his voice had the sweetness of all musical harmony’. For postlapsarian humans, singing praises to God was a way to address that loss. Written in one line and probably sung in unmeasured time, her chant reflected the groupings of words, rather than following an imposed rhythm. Most performers, unable to read music or sharing from a single copy, would have committed the music to memory. One reason compositions began to be written down around this period was in response to the Church’s desire to control the liturgy – though it is hard to see how Hildegard’s often ecstatic, decorative vocal line and glittering, poetic texts obeyed anyone’s idea of order and restraint.
The two chief bodies of work are the morality play Ordo Virtutum and the Symphonia, songs set to Hildegard’s own texts on a wide range or religious subjects from the Virgin Mary, to angels, saints, martyrs, confessors and their numerous feast days. Certain imagery recurs, always in service to the sacred purpose:
Monks and nuns were secluded from the world, but the world came to them
greenness (viriditas), growth, fertility, flowers, jewels, precious metals, fire, purity, womanhood and Christ as husband and lover (often using erotic language from the Song of Songs). O Ecclesia celebrates St Ursula and her 11,000 virgin martyrs, who reject marriage on earth and await God ‘with desire’. Rhapsody, upward leaps (often of rising fifths) and a sense of improvisation make Hildegard’s music instantly recognisable.
So many questions jostle to be asked concerning Hildegard’s music. Few have categorical answers. For listeners or performers alike today, an act of enquiry is essential to the way we approach her work. How did it sound? Who sang it? Did the single line of chant have an instrumental accompaniment? Was the music known
When Hildegard passed away, two arcs of colour reportedly illuminated the sky
beyond the walls of her monastery? Who notated it? Was it written down at the time of composition or gathered later? Is it like other music of the time? Can we even be sure she wrote it? If it wasn’t her, then who did write it? This is not to suggest any scepticism in describing Hildegard as a composer, but to ask what it meant to be a composer at a time when art was made to serve God. The names of artists and makers who painted church walls or carved in wood or stone, or made glass or, too, wrote music, are forgotten.
Hildegard von Bingen, because of her celebrity and achievements, her writings and visions and, above all, her music, is remembered. She died in 1179 aged 81, after battles with her health and with the Church, weary of ‘this present life’. When she passed away, two arcs of colour reportedly illuminated the sky as ‘the holy virgin gave her happy soul to God’, a fitting miracle for one who, more than eight centuries later in 2012, would be made a saint. Hildegard’s spirit lives on, as fierce, defiant, creative and brilliant as ever.