Hildegard von Bingen

Hildegard was born in 1098 at Bermersheim in the Rhineland, the tenth child of a family of minor nobility. Her parents destined her for the religious life early on: at about eight she was entrusted to Jutta of Sponheim, a recluse living beside the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg. There she learned the Latin of the psalms, the chant of the Office and the rhythm of monastic life, and took her vows around 1112, as the small cell grew into a community of women.

From childhood Hildegard said she saw a “living light” that revealed images and words to her. For a long time she kept it secret. Elected magistra of the community on Jutta’s death in 1136, she received in 1141 what she described as a divine command to write. With the help of the monk Volmar she spent ten years on Scivias (“Know the Ways”), a vast account of twenty-six visions on creation, redemption and the end of time. In 1147–48 Pope Eugene III had part of the text read at the Synod of Trier and encouraged her to continue: the Rhineland nun became a recognised authority.

With this support Hildegard left Disibodenberg despite the monks’ opposition and around 1150 founded her own convent at Rupertsberg, opposite Bingen on the Rhine. In 1165 she opened a second at Eibingen on the other bank. An energetic abbess, she defended her sisters’ independence, negotiated with bishops and kept up a correspondence of several hundred letters with popes, the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, abbots and lay people seeking her advice.

Her music is inseparable from this community life. She composed more than seventy liturgical chants — antiphons, responsories, hymns, sequences — gathered under the title Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum (“Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations”). Her melodies are monophonic like plainchant but stand out for their very wide range, their soaring flights into the upper register and their long garlands of notes on a single syllable. She also wrote the Ordo Virtutum, a musical drama in which the Virtues fight over a soul against the Devil, who does not sing but speaks: it is one of the oldest works of sung theatre whose author we know.

Her activity went far beyond music. Hildegard wrote two more great books of visions, the Liber vitae meritorum and the Liber divinorum operum, treatises on medicine and natural history (Physica, Causae et curae) describing plants, stones and animals, and even invented a secret language, the Lingua ignota. Past the age of sixty she undertook preaching tours through the towns of the Rhineland and Swabia, something exceptional for a woman of her time.

For Hildegard, music was no ornament: it was the memory of the harmony humanity had known in paradise and lost through the Fall. To sing was to regain a little of that union with God. She defended this forcefully in 1178, when the prelates of Mainz placed her convent under interdict for burying an excommunicated nobleman: deprived of song for several months, her nuns could only say the Office in low voices. Hildegard then wrote a famous letter reminding them that those who silence sung praise deprive themselves of the music of heaven. The interdict was lifted a few months before her death. Her chants survive mainly in two manuscripts, the Dendermonde codex and the Wiesbaden “Riesencodex”, copied under her supervision or shortly after she died.

She died at Rupertsberg on 17 September 1179, aged eighty-one. Venerated locally for centuries, she was rediscovered in the twentieth century by musicians and the wider public: her chants have been recorded by many ensembles and reach far beyond specialist circles. In 2012 Pope Benedict XVI extended her cult to the universal Church and proclaimed her a Doctor of the Church, a title shared by very few women.