Composer
Hildegard von Bingen
A Benedictine abbess whose chant is among the earliest music we can still attribute to a named composer.
Hildegard von Bingen was a Benedictine abbess, writer, and mystic whose surviving music makes her one of the earliest composers in Western history whose name we can actually attach to specific surviving works - most Medieval era chant survives anonymously, passed down through generations of unnamed church musicians.
Life in brief
Hildegard was born in 1098 in the Rhineland, the tenth child of a noble family, and at about eight she was placed in the care of an anchoress, Jutta, at the monastery of Disibodenberg. She had experienced visions since early childhood. When Jutta died in 1136, Hildegard became leader of the community of nuns.
In her forties, she began writing down her visions. Her great book Scivias ("Know the Ways") - from which the illumination above comes - was endorsed by Pope Eugenius III, which gave her extraordinary authority for a woman of her time. Around 1150 she founded her own convent at Rupertsberg, near Bingen, and later a second across the Rhine.
She wrote books on theology, medicine, and the natural world, invented her own secret language, made preaching tours - almost unheard of for a woman - and corresponded with popes, the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, and the leading churchmen of Europe. She died in 1179, and in 2012 she was formally canonized and named a Doctor of the Church.
Music and style
Her music consists of monophonic chant - a single melodic line, no harmony - but is notable for its unusually wide melodic range and soaring, expressive lines compared to much of the plainchant repertoire around it. Her melodies leap and swoop over large spans, setting her own poetry full of vivid imagery - greenness, fire, light, jewels - and she wrote for the nuns of her convent to sing.
Key works
- Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum ("Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations") - a collection of around 75 chants for the church year.
- Ordo Virtutum ("Order of the Virtues") - a sung music drama depicting a battle for a human soul's salvation, making it one of the earliest surviving works of musical theater, predating opera by roughly 450 years. Only the Devil does not sing: he can only shout, cut off from divine harmony.
- "O virtus Sapientiae" - a short antiphon to Holy Wisdom.
- "Ave generosa" - a hymn to the Virgin Mary.
Legacy
Beyond music, Hildegard was a significant figure in her own right as a theologian, naturalist, and correspondent with popes and kings - her music represents just one part of an unusually wide-ranging body of work for anyone in the 12th century, regardless of gender. Her music was largely forgotten for centuries, then rediscovered in the late 20th century: a 1982 recording of her songs, A Feather on the Breath of God, became a surprise bestseller, and she is now one of the most recorded of all medieval composers.
Where to start listening: any recording of her chant compositions is a good starting point - the Ordo Virtutum is the most substantial single work to explore once the shorter chants feel familiar. "O virtus Sapientiae" is a beautiful first taste.