Symphonia of vision

At dawn on the feast day, songs of praise resound within the walls of Disibodenberg Abbey. The sound of female voices is echoed by the sound of male voices nearby. The psalms chanted follow one another in the order established by Saint Benedict when he sang with his brothers within the walls of Montecassino and was answered by the female voices of Saint Scholastica (480–547) and the other nuns from the nearby monastery of Piumarola. 

The Sunday psalms are psalms of praise and joy. They invite participants to praise God with “sincerity of heart,” to “receive wisdom within,” after being purified with hyssop that makes us “whiter than snow.” The heart, “quenched in the soul and satiated in love,” brings forth a new song. It is a time of “dancing and celebration, of trumpet sound and the clash of cymbals.”

During the first 40 years of her life, Hildegard would have sung these words thousands of times. Moreover her experience of sacred music was deeply theological and visionary: a time of deep listening and even gestation, when earthly words and images were joined by otherworldly words, images, and music that in vision form an open window to the beyond. 

Here the divine message pervaded and infused her, the soul’s sphere of fire resonating with the divine sphere of fire, like a string that begins to vibrate through sympathy without being struck. It was a time of bliss and joy. Hildegard wrote, “the soul is symphonic,” because the moment it is infused into the body, it is endowed with the capacity to resonate and vibrate with the symphony of creation—God’s great work—leading the body to live in harmony, to act virtuously, and to build the great city of living stones. 

This is the sacred and symphonic journey Hildegard traveled and to which her work bears witness. 

NEW MELODIES, TIMELESS TRUTHS

Fragments from Hildegard’s everyday life come to us from her letters and the accounts of her biographers. In the cloister, for instance, her sisters heard her singing new music she had composed: a song addressed to Mary, “Virga ac diadema,” “scepter and crown of the king,” while enclosed in her cell and welcoming the Word of divine light. The opening verses of the composition almost seem to capture Hildegard’s destiny; in her monastic seclusion, she could recollect herself, listening in obedience, in the humility of the blanket of earth, in the resonant vessel of her womanly body, and cherishing the gift of the revealed vision, keeping it in her heart, like Mary. There she meditated, emerging as if from the tabernacle to spread a perfume made of words, sounds, and images.

The fame and the beauty of Hildegard’s compositions, made up of around 80 hymns, antiphons, and sequences, spread far. In 1148 a letter arrived from Odo of Soissons (died c. 1170) consulting her on theological questions, but not before expressing admiration for her as a writer and composer. “It is said that you are transported to the heavens, to see and to narrate, through writing, infinite things,” Odo wrote. “And that you compose songs with a new melody, although in this you have never been instructed.”

She also decided to combine words and sounds with the design of images. Long melismas (vocal runs in which one word moves through many notes) expand across the horizontal dimension of time. Broad pitch intervals extend high and low within the vertical dimension of space, from the depths of the earth’s deep sounds to the sidereal heights of high notes. Hildegard conveys through sound the divine love embracing a vast creation. Her songs still amaze today for their beauty and unique style. 

When she sings of Mary, Star of the Sea, in the hymn “O clarissima mater sanctae medicinae,” she stretches the word “sea,” chanting it in 19 neumes (a form of musical notation predating the five-line staff). In the original Gregorian chant inspiring it, “Ave maris stella,” there were only nine. The listener perceives the voice coming and going; in the musical score the neumes move, rising slightly and then falling back on themselves—like the waves of the sea on which shines the light of Mary, star and guide for navigating sailors (see CH #159 for more on Mary as Stella Maris).

In her Kyrie the voice spans almost two octaves. Sounds rise at the top and then descend again at the bottom. The movement, repeated several times, outlines the shape of a mountainous landscape on which the wind blows. The sound guides listeners into the interior landscape and invokes divine mercy in prayer. It is music that broadens the gaze by placing itself outside the firmament.

From this perspective Hildegard illustrated her vision of divine creation, seen first as an egg (p. 26), then as a wheel, and finally as a whole, complete, and revolving sphere (p. 17), with the earth/humanity at its center, surrounded by all the elements. The divine Caritas, God’s love infused throughout creation, embraces the sphere. To convey the circularity of the wheel and of the globe, Hildegard invites the viewer to perceive that what is “below is also above,” and vice versa. In her musical writing, she paired the word “abyss” with high-pitched sounds and the word “stars” with low-pitched sounds, as in the song “Caritas abundat.” This shift forces both singer and listener to broaden their perceptual boundaries and sense themselves within a sphere held within the heart of God.

In her vision, from the mouth of Caritas, descend golden threads that hold together the sphere of creation, the image of “the supreme harmony of divine order.” Hildegard depicted this golden dimension in both her musical compositions and in the construction of Scivias’s illuminated works. In the chants she does so through using intervals of the third, fifth, octave, and thirteenth. In Scivias she places three miniatures with a distinctive “L” shape at the same intervals, indicating an ideal turning point in the journey, demonstrating how the map of the work coincides with the shape of the golden rectangle, an image of God’s perfection in her visions.

INSPIRED HYMNS

The year 1147–48 marked the public recognition of Hildegard’s prophetic role and the establishment of Rupertsberg monastery. Leaving cloistered protection she crossed the threshold, taking up the royal scepter and donning the crown of her habit, as in the words of the hymn “Virga ac diadema,” imitating the strength of Saint Ursula (died c. 383) and the 11,000 virgins, to whom Hildegard would dedicate inspired hymns.

The call of the divine voice, “write and cry,” which she had received a few years earlier, brought about a shift from the time of gestation to the time of birth, from the time of deep listening to the time of writing. Her writing was rooted in the shared chorality of the monastery, as in her vision in which Virginitas, a splendid young woman in a red dress and loose hair, stands tall in the ample bosom of the great woman, the church, surrounded by a choir of women and men (see p. 34 of the magazine pdf). 

The figure demonstrates the beauty of those who live in self-integrity, who have recomposed the gift received on their journey and can now spread their calling and their talent. Her voice, anchored in her body and in the earth’s depths, can soar freely to dizzying heights. The female figures around Virginitas wear headdresses with two intertwined arches. In her written vision, Hildegard describes the shining sphere of the Trinity at the center, a symbol of creative and dancing life.

The construction of the new monastery likely coincided with the writing of Hildegard’s visions describing the “Building of Salvation” (found in Scivias III.2). Here the human journey, sustained by virtue, culminates in judgment, and the Symphonia of paradise where the joyful praises of the inhabitants of the heavenly city unfold. In her description Hildegard centers the first songs of the Symphonia and a portion of the dialogues of the Ordo virtutum, a sacred drama written by Hildegard, and wrote: “If the word is the voice of the body and humanity of the Son of God, the song is the voice of the spirit, the image of the divinity of the Son.” 

Scivias concludes with the exuberance of Psalm 150: “Praise God with the sound of the trumpet . . . praise him with the clash of cymbals.”

HEAVENLY SYMPHONY

On May 1, 1152, in the month of Mary, the chapel of the new Rupertsberg monastery was inaugurated with a performance of the Ordo virtutum. In this sacred drama, the singing women—adorned with jewels, loose hair, and silk robes—represent the divine Virtues, faithful and precious companions who help Anima free herself from the devil’s temptations. They lead her to the nuptial bed to receive the kiss of peace from her bridegroom, Christ. Throughout, the devil’s graceless voice is devoid of melody. The Virtues remind Anima not to be like Adam, who, in his initial disobedience, lost his angelic voice, forcing humanity from then on to seek the lost harmony.

This reflection on music, present throughout Hildegard’s work, is beautifully conveyed in a testamentary letter written a few months before her death. She addressed this letter to the prelates of Mainz who, due to a well-known incident, had forbidden her and the other nuns from singing and receiving the Eucharist. It almost seems as if God compelled her to write a testamentary letter explaining that praising God with song and dance is the path to the wedding, to reunion with God, as in the words of the hymn “Laus trinitati”: “Praise to the trinity, the sound and life and creative life of all within their life.”

In the following years, from 1151 to 1158, Hildegard completed writing the Symphony of the Harmony of the Celestial Revelation (Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum). By the end of her life, the Symphonia consisted of more than 70 antiphons, responsories, sequences, and hymns. Her music was well known. The Belgian community of Villares requested her written scores, thus creating the manuscript now known as the Dendermonde Codex.

Around 1170 Hildegard experienced a second period of transition and expansion, likely with the construction of a second monastery and her preaching travels (see pp. 22–23). At the same time, the Rupertsberg Scriptorium became a major production site. Aware of her journey’s significance, Hildegard decided to collect her entire work in the great manuscript project of the giant codex, Riesencodex, where the words and music of her songs were written in the supple script of an early form of Western musical notation known as St. Gall neumes. 

Thus was born her last work, the illuminated manuscript of Scivias, in which she channeled all the wisdom she had gathered over her 80 years through the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Throughout the work images of concentric circles represent the celestial hosts adoring the white circle of divine light. Each circle in the work is the image of a sound, and together they create a musical score that, in the final moment of Paradise, gives rise to perfect consonance, the supreme image of harmony and praise. The work concludes with the seven circles in which Mary, the angels, and the Just (saints) sing hymns. In the center is the circle of women, the Virgins, who, like the Virtues, sing of their joy, “the fruits and flowers of the fragrant earth” placed like “a honeycomb dripping with honey,” at the center of the firmament in the heart of God. CH