O Virtus Sapiente (“O Power of Wisdom”) Hildegard of Bingen (c.1098-1179) [PIANO]
Susan Addington – Flute
[THE FOLLOWING TEXT GOES WITH THE PRELUDE]
O power of Wisdom who circles circling, enclosing all in one life-giving journey, you have three wings: one soars into heaven, and another draws moisture from the earth, and the third lies everywhere. Praise to you, as is your due, O Wisdom.
Improvisation
Hildegard of Bingen (c.1098 – 1179) was a German Benedictine abbess and polymath active as a writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary, and as a medical writer and practitioner during the Middle Ages. She is one of the best-known composers of sacred chant, as well as the most recorded in modern history. Hildegard’s convent elected her as magistra (mother superior) in 1136. She founded the monasteries of Rupertsberg in 1150 and Eibingen in 1165. Hildegard wrote theological, botanical, and medicinal works, as well as letters, hymns, and antiphons for the liturgy. She also wrote poetry, while supervising illuminations (art) in the Rupertsberg manuscript of her first work, Scivias. There are more surviving chants by Hildegard than by any other composer from the entire Middle Ages, and she is one of the few known composers to have written both the music and the words. Her music is well preserved in part because she was one of the first composers to use the new musical notation invented by Guido d’Arrezo (992-1033) — indicating pitches on a staff of lines and spaces (the birth of modern music notation). She is also noted for the invention of a constructed language known as Lingua Ignota. (She never received a formal education — her education was a combination of informal coaching by colleagues and self-taught.)
One of her works, the Ordo Virtutum (Order of the Virtues), is a play/opera about the struggle for a human soul between the Virtues and the Devil. The parts of the Virtues are all sung by female singers, but the Devil’s part is SPOKEN by a male performer! (Because, according to Hildegard, the Devil cannot produce divine harmony — he can only yell or grunt.) The effect is quite dramatic!
The Catholic Church has what are known as “Doctors of the Church” — men and women who have made a significant contribution to theology or doctrine through their research, study, or writing. Out of 37 such Doctors, four are women, and Hildegard is one of them.
Hildegard was born around 1098, although the exact date is uncertain. Her parents were of the free lower nobility. Sickly from birth, Hildegard is traditionally considered their youngest and tenth child. (The tenth child, or ‘tithe’ was traditionally dedicated by their parents to the Church.) She was committed to the Church as an oblate around age 8. At first she told no one of her visions, fearful of the consequences. But word leaked out, and in 1147/48 Pope Eugenius gave her Papal approval to document her visions as revelations from the Holy Spirit, giving her instant and enormous credence.
From age THREE Hildegard’s spiritual awareness was grounded in visions she called the umbra viventis lucis, “the reflection of the living Light.” As she writes (age 70):
From my early childhood, before my bones, nerves, and veins were fully strengthened, I have always seen this vision in my soul…. In this vision my soul, as God would have it, rises up high into the vault of heaven and into the changing sky and spreads itself out among different peoples, although they are far away from me in distant lands and places…. I do not hear them with my outward ears, nor do I perceive them by the thoughts of my own heart or by any combination of my five senses, but in my soul alone, while my outward eyes are open. So I have never fallen prey to ecstasy in the visions, but I see them wide awake, day and night. And I am constantly fettered by sickness, and often in the grip of pain so intense that it threatens to kill me, but God has sustained me until now. The light which I see thus is not spatial, but it is far, far brighter than a cloud which carries the sun. I can measure neither height, nor length, nor breadth in it; and I call it “the reflection of the living Light.” And as the sun, the moon, and the stars appear in water, so writings, sermons, virtues, and certain human actions take form for me and gleam.
When Hildegard died in 1179, her sisters claimed they saw two streams of light appear in the skies and cross over the room where she was dying. She was 81.
This morning’s prelude is a simple instrumental setting of one of her chants.