International Society of Hildegard von Bingen Studies

[Nunc aperuit]Back to Table of Contents
Psalm antiphon for the Virgin (D 154v, R 467ra) by Hildegard of Bingen

Hodie
aperuit nobis clausa porta
quod serpens in muliere suffocavit,
unde lucet in aurora
flos de Virgine Maria.

Today
was opened unto us a shut-up gate.
For the serpent drew it tight, in woman choked—
yet from it gleams within the dawn
the Virgin Mary’s flower.

Latin collated from the transcription of Beverly Lomer and the edition of Barbara Newman; translation by Nathaniel M. Campbell.

Commentary: Themes and Theology
by Nathaniel M. Campbell

Although this is one of Hildegard’s shortest antiphons, its textual brevity merely serves to heighten the elegant coincidence of three striking images with which to describe that wondrous moment when the Incarnate Christ entered the world through his Mother Mary: a gate, a flower, and the dawn light. One could imagine Hildegard composing this piece while tending to the gardens that would have been kept behind the walls of the two monasteries in which she lived, accessible only by a gate.

The metaphor of vowed virginity as an enclosed garden (the hortus inclusus) was a frequent one especially in twelfth-century monastic spirituality, and takes on a particularly striking meaning within the context of Hildegard’s renown as an herbalist, putting into practice the theological theory of viriditas—nature’s fresh green vitality—that was her special hallmark. Here, Hildegard causes the closed gate of her garden to be symbolically aligned with the shut-up gate of the Temple described near the end of Ezekiel’s visionary journey through it (Ezekiel 44:1-3). As Barbara Newman notes, this prophecy of the Temple’s gate that would open only for the Prince “was a sign of Mary’s perpetual virginity,” the gate representing her womb, which opened not for any man but for the Son of God alone (Symphonia, p. 273). The gate thus symbolizes for Hildegard the power of virginal motherhood, and image she further explores in the responsory, O quam preciosa).

She then skillfully transitions the imagery from the gate of the garden sanctuary to the flower blooming within it by using the verb suffocavit to denote Eve—the “Everywoman” of mulier—losing that power of virginal motherhood to the trickery of the serpent, who simultaneously closes the gate to the life-giving garden, cuts Eve’s children off from Eden, and chokes out the seeds of the blooming flower within the garden. This transition then allows Hildegard to glimpse the flower that sprouted from the Virgin, freed from the serpent’s poisonous infertility, gleaming in the dawn light through the gate that has been reopened.

The musical setting enhances the thought movement between open and closed, choked and fertile. As Marianne Richert Pfau has shown, the musical phrases, while anchored on c, alternate tonalities between an initial octave range from G-g (introduced on Hodie) to a secondary range one fifth lower from F-f (introduced on aperuit nobis); moreover, the setting in D ends the piece on the secondary tonality, for “the F-context provides a tonal anchor for the fantastic upward surge toward the climax on flos” (Pfau, “Music and Text in Hildegard’s Antiphons”, p. 92). Furthermore, the opening phrases concerning the gate and the closing phrases concerning the Virgin’s flower are both elaborately melismatic, while the middle phrase describing the serpent’s duplicitous destruction of maternal power is jarringly declamatory, with just a few notes on each syllable. The story would not make any sense without that fallenness, but in the light of the Incarnation, it makes no more sense to dwell upon it. Darkness and drought there may be for a time, but joy and verdant life come in the morning’s dawn light.

Commentary: Music and Rhetoric
by Beverly Lomer

C mode
Range: F below the final to D an octave and a second above the final
Setting: melismatic, neumatic

There are a number of differences between the manuscripts in this antiphon. The small discrepancies are noted above the staff in text, and the more extensive ones are depicted on ossia staves. The opening word Hodie (“Today”) appears only in the early Dendermonde manuscript; other manuscripts read Nunc aperuit (“Now was opened”). This likely reflects the fact that the antiphon was originally composed for a specific feast, such as the Annunciation or Christmas; and that the text was later changed to make it more generally useful.

The phrasing is fairly regular and utilizes the final of the mode as the primary grammatical marker. In the Dendermonde manuscript, flos de virgine is outlined by G. This tone is often used as a tonal demarcator in C mode by Hildegard. In the Riesenkodex, the phrase ends on C.

There are also two other phrasing issues to look at. Line three of the transcription begins on E, which is not a grammatical marker in this mode; thus, it goes with the previous line. This makes for a long phrase to sing. If it has to be broken, after nobis is probably the best place.

The other is the discrepancy between the manuscripts on line 5 of the transcription. This is the start of the key phrase related to Mary’s virginity. It is unlikely that it would begin on the pitch D, and while Hildegard sometimes does not synchronize text and musical phrasing, in this case, the incongruity seems too much. The neumes are quite clear in the Riesenkodex, but it is probably best to go with the Dendermonde version here. Finally, the phrase, flos de virgine ends on C in R and G in D. Outlining by G sets this image apart and thus serves as an emphatic device. However, as the melody is quite different in each manuscript, as is indicated by the full ossia staff, it is up to the performer to decide which to use.

The form of this piece is narrative. It does not address Mary as most of the others do, and there is no salutation, and so would not fall into the category of epideictic rhetoric. Each of the key words and phrases is outlined by the final C. The exception is the phrase flos de virgine in D, which is outlined by G. This phrase can be grouped with the previous one, unde lucet in aurora, but would make for a long line to sing. Flos is clearly the climax and most significant image in this antiphon—not only is it set apart by the fifth, G, but it also attains the highest pitch, D an octave and a second above the final. While Hildegard has employed the high D in other pieces as a type of dissonance (e.g. Ave Maria, O auctrix vite and O clarissima), here it clearly accords with the grammatical punctuation by G and thus the temporary change of ‘tonality’ also serves as an emphatic strategy.

Further Resources for Hodie aperuit

Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia, ed. Barbara Newman (Cornell Univ. Press, 1988 / 1998), pp. 116 and 273.
Lomer, Beverly R. “Rhetoric and the Creation of Feminist Consciousness in the Marian Songs of Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179).” Ph.D. diss., Florida Atlantic University, 2006.
Lomer, Beverly. Music, Rhetoric and the Sacred Feminine. Saarbrücken, Germany: Verlag Dr. Müller, 2009.
Pfau, Marianne Richert. “Music and Text in Hildegard’s Antiphons.” In Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia, ed. Newman, pp. 74-94, esp. 91-3.
For a discography of this piece, see the comprehensive list by Pierre-F. Roberge: Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) - A discography

Psalm antiphon for the Virgin (D 154v, R 467r) by Hildegard of BingenBack to Table of Contents

Quia ergo femina mortem instruxit,
clara virgo illam interemit,
et ideo est summa benedictio
in feminea forma
pre omni creatura,
quia Deus factus est homo
in dulcissima et beata virgine.

For since a woman drew up death,
a virgin gleaming dashed it down,
and therefore is the highest blessing found
in woman’s form
before all other creatures.
For God was made a human
in the blessed Virgin sweet.

Latin collated from the transcription of Beverly Lomer and the edition of Barbara Newman; translation by Nathaniel M. Campbell.

Commentary: Themes and Theology
by Nathaniel M. Campbell

This antiphon continues the narrative description of the Virgin’s place within salvation history begun in Hodie aperuit nobis; in this way, the pair are set apart from the responsories that precede them and the antiphons that follow, which directly address the Virgin in praise and intercession. With its opening, Hildegard provides a striking complement to 1 Corinthians 15:21-22, in which the two women (Eve and Mary) act in place of the two men (Adam and Christ): “For since by a human came death, by a human came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” The choice of verbs to describe the contrastive actions of the two women—instruxit and interemit—continues the imagery that Hildegard used in the responsories, Ave Maria, O auctrix vite and O clarissima, in which Eve “constructs” the hollow walls of death and the Virgin tears them down, “rebuilding up” life, health, and salvation in their place.

That shift in perspective from the Adam/Christ pair to the Eve/Mary one allows Hildegard to move into one of her more elegant expressions of the “highest blessing found / in woman’s form,” precisely because of the Virgin’s victory over death in the purity of her sweet, life-giving womb. Barbara Newman notes that this piece joins the antiphon, O quam magnum miraculum, and the sequence, O virga ac diadema, in expanding this exaltation in the person of the Virgin to “woman per se,” whose form “denotes both the Platonic idea and the physical beauty of woman” (Symphonia, p. 273). Because of Hildegard’s Platonic metaphysics, in which humanity stands astride the ladder of being, stretching from the heart of divinity itself down to the vilest, mortal materiality, God’s choice to become a human through a feminea forma raises her weakness into a blessing that surpasses all other creatures. Moreover, although the text itself contrasts the femina (Eve) of the first line with the virgo (Mary) of the second, the benedictio of the third is shared by the Virgin with her fallen ancestor, as Hildegard repeats the musical phrase of line 1’s femina on benedictio (line 3 in the text, line 5 in the transcription). This emphasizes the fact that the blessing of Mary’s virginal restoration of human nature is shared with all womankind.

Commentary: Music and Rhetoric
by Beverly Lomer

E mode
Range: B below the final to E an octave above the final
Setting: neumatic

E is the primary tonal marker in this antiphon. B is deployed as a secondary demarcating tone.

The first phrase is contained in the first two lines of the transcription, and a tick barline has been added at the end of line 2. While this can be performed as one phrase, it is too long for a readable transcription, and so it has been broken into two lines. The same is true for the lines 3 and 4 of the transcription.

At the end of line 4, B becomes the tone that outlines the phrases. This change lasts for two lines, and then E returns as the grammatical marker. Once again, the themes/images of the sacred feminine, which are characteristic of the Marian songs, are highlighted/emphasized by the change from E to B as the tonal marker.

The differences between the manuscripts in Quia ergo femina are primarily in the use of neumes.These have been noted in the transcription, with the neumes that are different in the Riesenkodex illustrated above the line.

Like Hodie aperuit, this antiphon is in narrative form and does not address Mary directly. Rather, it describes the contrast between her saving motherhood and Eve’s destruction. The phrases are well marked by the final and fifth. The melody rises to the highest pitch (E an octave above the final) on the word virgo (in reference to Mary), and further emphasis is obtained by the approach to the registral pitch, which is accomplished by two consecutive leaps. The important and central phrase, et ideo est summa benedictio, is outlined by B, and the following phrase, in feminea forma, begins on B but concludes on E. The change from punctuation by the final sets this theme apart and highlights its importance.

Further Resources for Quia ergo femina

Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia, ed. Barbara Newman (Cornell Univ. Press, 1988 / 1998), pp. 116 and 273.
Lomer, Beverly R. “Rhetoric and the Creation of Feminist Consciousness in the Marian Songs of Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179).” Ph.D. diss., Florida Atlantic University, 2006.
Lomer, Beverly. Music, Rhetoric and the Sacred Feminine. Saarbrücken, Germany: Verlag Dr. Müller, 2009.
For a discography of this piece, see the comprehensive list by Pierre-F. Roberge: Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) - A discography

Psalm antiphon for the Virgin (D 154v, R 467rb) by Hildegard of BingenBack to Table of Contents

Cum processit factura
digiti Dei,
formata
ad imaginem Dei
in ortu mixti sanguinis
per peregrinationem
casus Ade,
elementa susceperunt gaudia in te,
o laudabilis Maria,
celo rutilante
et in laudibus sonante.

Although the craft
of God’s extended finger,
created in
God’s image,
came forth in birth of blood commingled,
in pilgrimage exiled
by Adam’s fall;
the elements received their joys in you,
O Mary, worthy of our praise,
as heaven gleams with rubied light
and echoes gladsome shouts of praise.

Latin collated from the transcription of Beverly Lomer and the edition of Barbara Newman; translation by Nathaniel M. Campbell.

Commentary: Themes and Theology
by Nathaniel M. Campbell

This antiphon is a companion piece to Cum erubuerint, as both draw the contrast between the “pilgrimage exiled” (peregrinatio) of fallen humanity and the grace of the Virgin as she restores that fallenness and leads it back to its paradisical, celestial home. The breadth of that restorative and re-creative agency is celebrated in the last four lines, which Barbara Newman has described as a “sonnet-like volta” (Symphonia, p. 274), as the elemental fibers of the universe regain the harmonious joy that they had lost when, after the Fall and the expulsion from paradise, they had been cast into noisome confusion:

And so all the elements of the world, which before had existed in great calm, were turned to the greatest agitation and displayed horrible terrors, because when humankind chose disobedience, rebelling against God and forsaking tranquility for disquiet, that Creation, which had been created for the service of humanity, turned against humans in great and various ways so that humankind, having lowered themselves, might be held in check by it. What does this mean? That humankind showed themselves rebels against God in the place of delights, and therefore that Creation, which had been subjected to them in service, now opposed itself to them.
—Scivias I.2.27^[1]

The hallmark of this harmony is the very music with which Hildegard has set this praise of the Virgin, which echoes the praises that ring presently and eternally in the heavens where she reigns as Queen—as Newman notes, the ablative absolute with present participles of the last two lines shifts the piece out of the past tenses of its finite verbs into the heavenly state of the eternal present (Symphonia, p. 274). Music exemplifies the intended order of the opus Dei, the “work of God,” which is both the liturgical life of the Benedictine monastery and the entire expanse of creation upon which Hildegard constantly reflects, held in eternal order in the heart of God (cf. O quam mirabilis est). The celestial symphony that closes today’s antiphon with a lengthy melisma on sonante is also intimately bound up with the celestial light, in this case the ruby-red glow (rutilante) that in Hildegard’s symbolic lexicon refers to the dawn light, her favorite image for the Virgin’s womb as it mediates the irruption of divine light into the world. This synaesthetic complex of light and sound was the hallmark of her visionary experiences, in which light resounds and music sparkles.

Two particular images in the first part of the antiphon elaborate the contrast between God’s craft and handiwork—humankind as factura digiti Dei—and its fallen exile, whose originally ordered procreation was corrupted into “birth of blood commingled” (in ortu mixti sanguinis). The first image, of humankind “crafted” (factura) and “formed” (formata) by God, is grammatically striking: the terms are gendered female. This is also not the only verse in which Hildegard uses this feminine factura for humankind; although its musical notation does not survive, the verse O factura Dei explicitly celebrates this grammatically feminine handiwork as it is transformed by the Incarnation itself. While the term factura is almost certainly an allusion to Ephesians 2:10 (Ipsius enim sumus factura, creati in Christo Jesu in operibus bonis, “For we are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus in good works”), Hildegard’s choice to keep the feminine gender with formata rather than follow St. Paul’s masculine plural creati is a conscious decision to cast the humankind whose chaotic exile is reordered by the Virgin with a feminine face. The same word is used in the verse in praise of the Incarnation because, as Hildegard famously put it, “Man signifies the divinity of the Son of God, but woman signifies his humanity” (Liber Divinorum Operum I.4.100). The feminine is the place where God meets humankind, stooping down to us as we open ourselves to receive him through the virginal fecundity of Mary and her continuation, the Church. As a result, for Hildegard, “humankind in its totality—women and men in history, community, in relation with God—had a feminine face.”^[2]

By casting unfallen humankind as God’s feminine handiwork, this antiphon is one of the few places in Hildegard’s Marian corpus where she makes Adam the representative of fallen sexual intercourse—the “birth of blood commingled.”^[3] (Hildegard understood sexual procreation to be a mingling of the man’s blood—in the form of cool, foamy semen—with the woman’s blood—the warmer environment of the uterus.^[4]) This leaves the unnamed Eve free to represent the original factura digiti Dei, to be renewed and restored by the Virgin. Edenic procreation, according to one of Hildegard’s descriptions of it, would not have been by vaginal intercourse, though it would have been sweetly sensual. As Adam and Eve, husband and wife, lay side-by-side in their paradise:

They would gently perspire as if sleeping. Then the woman would become pregnant from the man’s perspiration (sudor), and, while they lay thus sweetly asleep, she would give birth to a child painlessly from her side … in the same way that God brought Eve forth from Adam, and that the Church was born from the side of Christ.^[5]

This painless birth was commonly understood to have been part of the grace of the Virgin Birth of Christ, as Mary would bear the Christ child absent the birthing pangs that were given in punishment of the Fall. Moreover, as with the third wing in O virtus Sapientie and verse 4b of Hildegard’s hymn to the Holy Spirit, O ignis Spiritus paracliti, the concept of sudor (and its verb, sudare) represented for Hildegard’s the Holy Spirit’s active, life-giving (vivificans) presence in the world as the sweet, aromatic distillation of fecundity. When the Holy Spirit overshadowed the Virgin at the Annunciation, it was this procreative sudor by which she would have conceived the Christ child. Thus, as Newman points out, “To this way of thinking, only the Virgin’s conception and childbearing reveal true ‘nature’ as God ordained it from the beginning; it is the motherhood of fallen Eve and her daughters that is ‘unnatural.’”^[6]

The connection between the macrocosmic elements and the microcosmic human body was central to Hildegard’s understanding of human biology, including sexual intercourse and postlapsarian procreation. Thus, the chaos and disorder of sexual intercourse—the uncontrollable urges of lust seething in the loins—are the human experience of the discord of all of creation and its elements after the Fall. As Hildegard described it in Scivias I.2.15:

But after Adam and Eve were driven out of the place of delight, they knew in themselves the work of conceiving and bearing children. And falling thus from disobedience into death, when they knew they could sin, they discovered sin’s sweetness. And in this way, turning My rightful institution into sinful lust, although they should have known that the commotion in their veins was not for the sweetness of sin but for the love of children, by the Devil’s suggestion they changed it to lechery; and, losing the innocence of the act of begetting, they yielded it to sin.

In this antiphon, the elements themselves rejoice to be put back into balance with the restoration of the virginal nature to the factura Dei, the sinless God-made-human in the sinless Virgin’s womb. The lecherous, shame-faced blush with which its companion piece, Cum erubuerint, begins, is transformed into the glowing red light of the dawn that burst forth in heaven as the Son of God entered upon earth—or, as Hildegard put it in the antiphon, O quam magnum miraculum, when the Virgin did “the heavens grace / far more than e’er the earth in chaos cast.”

Commentary: Music and Rhetoric
by Beverly Lomer

E mode
Range: C below the final to D an octave and a second above the final
Setting: primarily neumatic, with one long melisma on the final word and several short melismas

The piece offers an example of some interesting phrasing. It begins with the phrase, Cum processit factura, outlined by the modal final, E. The three short phrases that follow the opening, digiti Dei, formata, and ad imaginem Dei, are extensions of the first. Together they create the opening statement. Each of these sub-phrases begins with the pitch, D, a less usual choice for this mode, and contain similar opening melodic motives. The melodic structure lends force to each image individually.

B is also used as a tonal demarcating tone, and this is more conventional, as it is the secondary focal tone of the mode. Lines 8 and 9 of the first page of the transcription comprise one phrase that is outlined by B; they are separated in the transcription for ease of reading. Similarly, the last line of page 1 is connected to line 1 of page 2. Tick barlines have been inserted as guides to performers.

The text begins as a narrative describing the fall, but transitions to address Mary at the end. The salutatory phrase, o laudabilis Maria, begins with B, ascends to C, and incorporates the melodic motive found on Dei in line 2 (page 1). The final word, sonante, is set to a lengthy melisma that also contains melodic motives from throughout the antiphon, thus serving as a musical peroratio.

Further Resources for Cum processit factura

Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia, ed. Barbara Newman (Cornell Univ. Press, 1988 / 1998), pp. 118 and 273-4.
Lomer, Beverly R. “Rhetoric and the Creation of Feminist Consciousness in the Marian Songs of Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179).” Ph.D. diss., Florida Atlantic University, 2006.
Lomer, Beverly. Music, Rhetoric and the Sacred Feminine. Saarbrücken, Germany: Verlag Dr. Müller, 2009.
Newman, Barbara. Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987 / 1997), p. 179.
For a discography of this piece, see the comprehensive list by Pierre-F. Roberge: Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) - A discography

Footnotes

^[1] Adapted from Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), p. 86; Latin text from the edition of Adelgundis Führkötter and Angela Carlevaris, CCCM 43 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1978), p. 32. ↩
^[2] Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Univ. of California Press, 1987 / 1997), p. 249. ↩
^[3] Adam also appears in verses 1b-2a of the sequence O virga ac diadema, but his appearance there is mirrored by Eve’s in verses 5a-6a. ↩
^[4] For Hildegard’s biology of sexual procreation, see Book II, chs. 129 and 137 of Cause et Cure [Causae et Curae], ed. Laurence Moulinier and Rainer Berndt (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003), pp. and 94-97 and 103. ↩
^[5] Hildegard of Bingen, Fragment IV.29, as quoted in Newman, Sister of Wisdom, p. 111. ↩
^[6] Newman, Sister of Wisdom, pp. 111-2. ↩

Psalm antiphon for the Virgin (D 155r, R 467rb) by Hildegard of BingenBack to Table of Contents

Cum erubuerint infelices
in progenie sua,
procedentes in peregrinatione casus,
tunc tu clamas clara voce,
hoc modo homines elevans
de isto malicioso
casu.

While downcast parents blushed,
ashamed to see their offspring
wand’ring off into the fallen exile’s pilgrimage,
you cried aloud with crystal voice,
to lift up humankind
from that malicious
fall.

Latin collated from the transcription of Beverly Lomer and the edition of Barbara Newman; translation by Nathaniel M. Campbell.

Commentary: Themes and Theology
by Nathaniel M. Campbell

This haunting yet hopeful antiphon, a companion to Cum processit factura, traces an arc from our first parents and their unhappy fall, through our fallen exile, to the Virgin’s clarion call to lift us up with her Son. For Hildegard, as for most patristic and medieval theologians and exegetes, the shameful blush that opens this antiphon reflects the reactions that Adam and Eve had to their nakedness before and after the Fall. Before, it is written, “They were both naked, and were not ashamed” (Gen. 2:25: Erat autem uterque nudus, et non erubescebant); but after they became aware of what they had done, of the paradise that they would lose because of their disobedience, they did take shame in that nakedness and moved to cover it up (Gen. 3:7). Sexuality, which was in Paradise God’s gift of procreation to the humans he made in his image and likeness, became tainted with that disobedience, with the pains of uncontrollable lust and the pangs of childbirth. In both this antiphon and in Cum processit factura, that vitiation of the sexuality’s original creative order is representative of the disorder wrought upon all of creation by the Fall.

This overturning of the natural order is what set humankind on their exile in this world—a pilgrimage in a world in which they do not rightly belong and which they cannot truly call their home; for the home for which they were made—Paradise—has been lost, and they wander now in the wilderness, trying to find their way back home through the darkness. The pilgrimage of sin seeks a home within this world; the pilgrimage of grace remains in exile in this world, for that pilgrim sets her sight upon the city and the home that is to come.

In the darkened, fallen world in which irrational sin seems to make sense and holiness demands homelessness, as it were, it is the paradoxical weakness of the Virgin’s meek and quiet voice that allows it to carry over the din. In this antiphon, Hildegard reserves the longest melismas and the highest notes for just two words: clara (“crystal-clear,” line 4) and casu (“fall,” final line). The Fall receives double the number of notes—a long, final, perhaps even wearying meditation. But the Virgin’s crystal-clear voice receives the highest note—G, an octave and a thid above the lowest note of the piece, the B that begins the final phrase on casu. That voice pierces through the confusion, and delivers the startling news that lifts us up out of it—the felix culpa:

He Who created you in the first human foresaw all things; and that same most gentle Father sent His Only-Begotten to die for the people, to deliver humanity from the power of the Devil. And thus humankind, having been delivered, shines in God, and God in humankind; humankind, having community in God, has in Heaven more radiant brightness than they had before. This would not have been so if the Son of God had not put on flesh, for if humankind had remained in Paradise, the Son of God would not have suffered on the cross. But when humankind was deceived by the wily serpent, God was touched by true mercy and ordained that His Only-Begotten would become incarnate in the most pure Virgin. And thus, after the ruin of humankind, many shining virtues were lifted up in Heaven, like humility, the queen of the virtues, which flowered in the virgin birth, and other virtues, which lead God’s elect to the heavenly places. For when a field with great labor is cultivated, it brings forth much fruit; and the same is shown in the human race, for after humanity’s ruin many virtues arose to raise it up again. But you, O humans, oppressed by the heaviness of the flesh, do not see that great glory God’s full justice has prepared for you, without stain or unworthiness, so that no one can throw it down. For before the structure of the world was made, God in true justice had foreseen all these things.
—Scivias I.2.30-31^[1]

Mediating the center of that “eternal counsel” and its predestined Incarnation is this paradox of the Virgin Mother, offering in her simplicity, humility, and purity the balm to heal the wounds of sin. Moreover, as Barabara Newman notes (Symphonia, p. 274), the syntax of this antiphon shifts (in a rhetorical move used similarly in Cum processit factura) startlingly from the perfect subjunctive of erubuerint—our parents’ blushes temporally consigned to the past—to the present tense of Mary’s clamas—for the Virgin’s voice calls out to us still, lifted out of the darkened constraints of mortal life and into the glories of eternity now streaming into time.

Commentary: Music and Rhetoric
by Beverly Lomer

E mode
Range: B below the final to G an octave and a third above the final
Setting: primarily neumatic, with strategically placed melismas on clara voce and casu

This short antiphon addresses Mary’s action, “then you cried aloud with crystal voice to lift up humankind from that malicious fall.” The image of the clara vox (“clear voice”) is interesting choice, as voice/word is generally associated with primary divinity. There is no mention of motherhood or other more conventional Marian imagery. Again, the light motif occurs with the use of the phrase clara voce.

E is the primary tonal demarcator in this piece, with B being used alternatively and strategically. B outlines the phrase, tunc tu clamas clara voce, and the extensive melisma on the final word, casu, begins on B below the final. This deployment of the secondary modal tone thus serves to emphasize and link the two ideas: Mary’s saving action (crying out with a clear voice) to save mankind from the Fall. The importance of Mary’s agency receives further emphasis in that the highest pitch, G, in Dendermonde is reached on the phrase, tunc tu clamas clara voce, and this only happens once. In the Riesenkodex, the G high point is transcribed down to the E an octave above the final, and while it remains the highest pitch, it does not produce quite the same effect as the version in D.

The opening phrase is outlined by E. The second line of the transcription begins on B but ends on E. This segment can be considered two ways: either as one long phrase or as two phrases. Similarly, the use of B to end hoc modo homines elevans can be considered as an “imperfect” ending and not a full stop.

The final word, casu (“fall”) interestingly begins on the lowest pitch, B below the final, and this is the only occurrence of that low note. Previous melodic material is then reiterated and thus recalled within its lengthy, concluding melisma.

Further Resources for Cum erubuerint

Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia, ed. Barbara Newman (Cornell Univ. Press, 1988 / 1998), pp. 118 and 274.
Lomer, Beverly R. “Rhetoric and the Creation of Feminist Consciousness in the Marian Songs of Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179).” Ph.D. diss., Florida Atlantic University, 2006.
Lomer, Beverly. Music, Rhetoric and the Sacred Feminine. Saarbrücken, Germany: Verlag Dr. Müller, 2009.
For a discography of this piece, see the comprehensive list by Pierre-F. Roberge: Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) - A discography

Footnotes

^[1] Adapted from Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), pp. 87-8; Latin text from the edition of Adelgundis Führkötter and Angela Carlevaris, CCCM 43 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1978), pp. 33-4. ↩

Psalm antiphon for the Virgin (D 155r-v, R 467rb-va) by Hildegard of BingenBack to Table of Contents

O quam magnum miraculum est
quod in subditam femineam
formam rex
introivit.
Hoc Deus fecit quia humilitas
super omnia ascendit.
Et o quam magna felicitas
est in ista forma,
quia malicia,
que de femina fluxit hanc
femina postea detersit
et omnem suavissimum
odorem virtutum edificavit
ac celum ornavit
plus quam terram prius
turbavit.

How great the wonder is!
Into the female form subdued
the King
has come.
This God has done, for meekness
mounts o’er all.
And O how great the happiness
is in that form,
for malice,
which from a woman flowed—
a woman then this malice wiped away,
and ev’ry sweet
perfume of virtues she has raised—
the heavens graced
far more than e’er the earth
in chaos cast.

Latin collated from the transcription of Beverly Lomer and the edition of Barbara Newman; translation by Nathaniel M. Campbell.

Commentary: Themes and Theology
by Nathaniel M. Campbell

This antiphon exemplifies St. Hildegard’s theology of the feminine, as the central character is not just the Virgin Mary or Eve, but womanhood itself—“the female form” that encompasses both mothers, one fallen into chaos, the other raised in meekness to grace the heavens with her sweet perfume of virtue (cf. Quia ergo femina). While the parallel of Eve and Mary was a common trope, Hildegard’s poetic density here collapses the two into one, in order to articulate the peculiar role that Woman plays in salvation history as the revelatory face of the divine: it is through “the female form subdued” that the mighty King enters into the world, into time, into history. Hildegard intentionally combines the two paradigmatic women of Mary and Eve because of the paradoxes that suffuse that entrance of eternity into time: the agency of submission, the exaltation of humility (cf. Luke 1:52), the fortunate Fall (magna felicitas), and heavenly adornment (ornavit) excelling earthly disorder (turbavit).

As she explains in Liber Divinorum Operum I.1.17:

God chose from his stock that sleeping earth that was completely unblemished by the taste of that [fruit] by which the ancient serpent deceived the first woman. This earth was prefigured by the staff of Aaron (Num. 17:8) to be the Virgin Mary, who in her great humility was the enclosed bedchamber of the King. For when she received from the throne the message that the Highest King wished to live in her enclosure, she perceived that earth from which she was created and replied that she was the handmaid of God (Luke 1:38). The woman who was first deceived did not do this, since she desired to have that which she ought not to have had.^[1]

This antiphon’s two exclamatory “how greats” establish the waypoints of salvation history—the great miracle of the Incarnation and the great “happiness” (felicitas) of the “fortunate” Fall. Yet, this felicitas is not merely the paradoxical fruit of the Fall in the coming of the Redeemer—“humankind, having community in God, has in Heaven more radiant brightness than they had before ... for after humanity’s ruin many virtues arose to raise it up again,” as Hildegard put it in Scivias I.2.30-1 (see further the Commentary on Cum erubuerint)—but also the felicity that the Virgin restores to womanhood in wiping away the wickedness of the flesh (malicia) that had marred Woman’s sacred fecundity. Thus, the second o quam magna looks both back to the Fall and forward to its resolution and the restoration of womanhood through the Virgin Mary and the Virgin Church.

Hildegard alludes to this manifestation of restored, virginal womanhood through Mary and into the Church in describing how the Virgin washed away Eve’s malice: by constructing (edificavit) a salvific structure redolent of the sweet perfume of virtues (the architectural imagery recalls the responsories, Ave Maria, O auctrix vite and O clarissima). This perfume of the gracious power by which the Church and her ministers enact the work of salvation is the sweet smell of “the blossom of celestial Zion, the mother and flower of roses and lilies of the valley,” as is sung in the great responsory for the Feast of the Assumption. These fragrant, virtuous ministries belonged particularly, in Hildegard’s mind, to the musical opus Dei that she and her order of virgins enacted every day—and thus that responsorial verse for the Virgin’s Assumption also resounded in the words of the visionary voice from heaven that declared the central place of Virginitas among the orders of the Church in Scivias II.5 (cf. O nobilissima viriditas).^[2] This antiphon celebrates that assumed and enthroned Queen of Heaven with the music to which Hildegard and her nuns gave voice within the Church’s halls, a participation in the eternal, celestial symphony that resounds in the Virgin’s court. Her greater grace in heaven subsumes their ministry on earth, and the long, final melisma of today’s antiphon brings harmony to the chaos of turbavit.

Commentary: Music and Rhetoric
by Beverly Lomer

E mode
Range: B below the final to G an octave and a third above the final
Setting: primarily neumatic, with several short melismas and one long melisma on the final word

This antipon presents some tricky phrasing issues. Key modal tones are E and B, and while Hildegard uses E regularly here, the way she deploys B is less straightforward as a grammatical marker.

There are two places where we meet the ambiguous use of the final on a conjuction that could come either at the end of one phrase or the beginning of the next. This happens with quod in Lines 2 and 3 and et in lines 7 and 8 of the first page of the transcription. One of Hildegard’s signature gestures is to open a phrase with a leap from the final to the fifth above. To place quod or et respectively at the beginning of the subsequent phrase would somewhat diminish the rhetorical emphasis of the upward leap of a fifth. On the other hand, placing the conjunction at the end of the line interferes with the cadence on the previous phrase. Here, the single note E on quod in line 3 and et in line 8 of the transcription, has been placed at the beginning of the phrase. The primary reason is that the words assigned to the leap in each case are not significant images that would carry high rhetorical force. Thus, it was decided to preserve the finality of the ending on the previous lines. As Hildegard employs both strategies, either option represents a reasonable choice; it is likely that the final on each conjunction should be slurred with the following syllable’s repetition of that note, to preserve the opening emphasis of the leap.

The form of this antiphon is narrative. The contrast between Mary and Eve is present, but the emphasis is on feminine humility, which Mary personifies. Indirectly, Mary’s actions recover the pre-lapsarian purity of the feminine: Woman is redeemed through her.

The opening statement encompasses the first five lines, ending with introivit. O quam magnum miraculum is set apart for emphasis by the musical grammar, beginning and ending on E. Est (line 2, page 1) is set to a similar melody as O quam. Musical intensity increases on line 3 with the rise to C above the final on the phrase, in subditam [femineam]. Textually, formam on line 4 belongs with in subditam femineam. However, to begin the next phrase, rex introivit, on A would be muscially awkward, as A is not otherwise used as a punctuating pitch here. The melody reaches another high point, D above the final on the word rex, and the same melodic motive that appears on subditam is also found on introivit, thus linking these ideas.

E an octave above the final appears in line 6 on humilitas, and not surprisingly, the word receives additional emphasis from the leap of a fifth. The phrase concludes on the next line, and a tick barline has been inserted for clarity.

On page 2 of the transcription, the text states that woman/Mary erased the harm done by Eve. The phrase, femina postea detersit (“a woman later wiped away”), referring to the malice wrought by Eve, is outlined by B. Previously, E functioned as the demarcating pitch. Moving to B sets this idea apart. The musical grammar also helps resolve the anacolouthon (broken syntax) of shifting from malicia / que (nominative) to hanc as the accusative object of detersit, as the latter demonstrative pronoun completes the cadence of the relative clause.

The ending amplifies the contrast by placing the musical emphasis on the harm previously done by Eve. The highest pitch, G an octave and a third above the final, is reached on prius (“before,” in reference to Eve], and turbavit (“disturbed”) receives the only lengthy melisma in the song.

Further Resources for O quam magnum miraculum

Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia, ed. Barbara Newman (Cornell Univ. Press, 1988 / 1998), pp. 120 and 274-5.
Lomer, Beverly R. “Rhetoric and the Creation of Feminist Consciousness in the Marian Songs of Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179).” Ph.D. diss., Florida Atlantic University, 2006.
Lomer, Beverly. Music, Rhetoric and the Sacred Feminine. Saarbrücken, Germany: Verlag Dr. Müller, 2009.
For a discography of this piece, see the comprehensive list by Pierre-F. Roberge: Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) - A discography

Footnotes

^[1] Trans. by Nathaniel M. Campbell, from the Latin text of the Liber Divinorum Operum, ed. A. Derolez and P. Dronke, in CCCM 92 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), p. 58. ↩
^[2] See further Nathaniel M. Campbell, “Imago expandit splendorem suum: Hildegard of Bingen’s Visio-Theological Designs in the Rupertsberg Scivias Manuscript,” Eikón / Imago 4 (2013, Vol. 2, No. 2), pp. 1-68, esp. pp. 57-61; accessible online here. ↩

Sequence for the Virgin (D 156r-v [incomplete], R 473vb-474r)Back to Table of Contents
by Hildegard of Bingen

1a. O virga ac diadema purpure regis
que es in clausura tua sicut lorica:

1b. Tu frondens floruisti in alia vicissitudine
quam Adam omne genus humanum produceret.

2a. Ave, ave, de tuo ventre alia vita processit
qua Adam filios suos denudaverat.

2b. O flos, tu non germinasti de rore
nec de guttis pluvie
nec aer desuper te volavit sed divina
claritas in nobilissima virga te produxit.

3a. O virga, floriditatem tuam Deus in prima die
creature sue previderat.

3b. Et te Verbo suo auream materiam,
o laudabilis Virgo, fecit.

4a. O quam magnum est in viribus suis latus viri,
de quo Deus formam mulieris produxit,
quam fecit speculum
omnis ornamenti sui et amplexionem
omnis creature sue.

4b. Inde concinunt celestia organa et miratur
omnis terra, o laudabilis Maria,
quia Deus te valde amavit.

5a. O quam valde plangendum et lugendum
est quod tristicia in crimine
per consilium serpentis in mulierem fluxit.

5b. Nam ipsa mulier, quam Deus matrem omnium
posuit, viscera sua
cum vulneribus ignorantie decerpsit, et plenum dolorem
generi suo protulit.

6a. Sed, o aurora, de ventre tuo novus sol processit,
qui omnia crimina Eve abstersit
et maiorem benedictionem per te protulit
quam Eva hominibus nocuisset.

6b. Unde, o Salvatrix, que novum lumen humano generi
protulisti: collige membra Filii tui
ad celestem armoniam.

1a. O branch and diadem in royal purple clad,
who like a shield stand in your cloister strong.

1b. You burst forth blooming but with buds quite different
than Adam’s progeny—th’ entire human race.

2a. Hail, o hail! For from your womb came forth another life,
that had been stripped by Adam from his sons.

2b. O bloom, you did not spring from dew
nor from the drops of rain,
nor has the windy air flown over you; but radiance divine
has brought you forth upon that noblest bough.

3a. O branch, your blossoming God had foreseen
within the first day of his own creation.

3b. And by his Word he made of you a golden matrix,
O Virgin, worthy of our praise.

4a. O, how great in power is that side of man,
from which God brought the form of woman forth,
a mirror made
of all his ornament, and an embrace
of all his own creation.

4b. The heavens’ symphony resounds, in wonder stands
all earth, O Mary, worthy of our praise,
for God has loved you more than all.

5a. O cry and weep! How deep the woe!
What sorrow seeped with guilt
in womanhood because the serpent hissed his wicked plan!

5b. That woman, whom God made to be the mother of the world,
had pricked her womb
with wounds of ignorance—the full inheritance of grief
she offered to her offspring.

6a. But from your womb, O dawn, has come the sun anew;
the guilt of Eve he’s washed away
and through you offered humankind a blessing
even greater than the harm that Eve bestowed.

6b. O Lady Savior, who has offered to the human race
a new and brighter light: together join the members of your Son
into the heavens’ harmony.

Latin collated from the transcription of Beverly Lomer and the edition of Barbara Newman; translation by Nathaniel M. Campbell. This phrasing is based on the musical structure of the piece around the tonal makers of A (the final) and E, and thus employs longer lines (and fewer lines per verse) than Newman’s edition; for a setting according to shorter musical sub-phrases, see Nathaniel Campbell’s entry for this sequence atFides Quaerens Intellectum.

Commentary: Themes and Theology
by Nathaniel M. Campbell

Even in Hildegard’s own lifetime, this incredible sequence in praise of the Virgin was recognized as one of her best. According to reports gathered into the Acta Canonizationis (“Proceedings of Canonization”) prepared by three canons of Mainz and sent to Rome in 1233, it may have been one of Hildegard’s personal favorites:

The lay-sister [conversa] Hedwig from Alzey says this and adds under oath that blessed Hildegard was almost constantly bed-ridden because of illness by the scourge of God, except for those times when she was illumined with the Holy Spirit. At the Holy Spirit’s touch, she would then walk about the cloister and sing the sequence that begins, “O virga ac diadema.” With this the door-keeper and the cellarer agree under oath.^[1]

It is not hard to see why Hildegard might have been so fond of it, as it deftly expresses much of her central theology of the place of the forma mulieris (4a) in salvation history—the “form of woman” stretching from the mater omnium (Eve, the “mother of all,” 5b) through Mary to Hildegard herself as a virgin mother of the community of nuns under her care.

The sequence follows a ring structure: the opening celebration of Mary’s royal stature (1a) is mirrored with the images of dawn and salvatrix (“Lady Savior”) in the final strophes (6a/b), with the middle two verse pairs forming the central thematic—the repeated opening image of the blossoming virga and its predestination (3a), the Virgin’s womb as golden material (3b), and the femininity it restores as mirror and embrace of all creation (4a), praised by the music of heaven and beloved as God’s bride (4b; cf. Ave generosa). In between these three thematic peaks come two mirrored meditations on the fallenness from which the Virgin’s womb and its fruit rescue humanity: on the one hand, the path of blooming life that Adam stripped from his progeny (1b-2a), restored in the Virgin by the procreative power not of created things but of the divine Creator (2b); and on the other hand, the lamentable pain and sorrow introduced into womanhood (in mulierem) and her progeny by Eve’s thorny embrace of ignorance (5a/b).

The grace of this sequence, moreoever, lies in its masterful musical composition, as music and word inextricably intertwine. Hildegard usually writes her sequences in the older compositional form of paired versicles, in which the two strophes of a pair share a common melody between them, but the piece is free to use different melodies for each successive pair. Hildegard, however, often allows herself more musical freedom than is traditional, as the textual expression presses beyond the strictly parallel melodies of each pair. In this sequence, Strophe 2b exhausts its parallel music from 2a at the end of its second line, while its third line takes its musical structure from the opening of strophe 3a—yet the musical transition occurs right in the middle of a textual phrase, as the end of the one line (divina) is an adjective modifying the noun (claritas, “radiance”) the opens the next. The final phrase of strophe 4a, moreover, cycles several times through its musical motif to cover the elaborate parallel images of speculum and amplexionem, whereas its paired strophe 4b needs only one round of its final phrase to express God’s love for the Virgin. The reverse occurs in the next pair of verses, as the final phrase of 5a is doubled in 5b to accommodate Eve’s two actions, decerpsit (“plucked”) and protulit (“offered”).

Most of the verses open with one of Hildegard’s most characteristic musical tropes, an upward leap of a fifth. After the anomalous opening pair (on which see Beverly Lomer’s commentary below), that leap is used to begin all remaining verses, with the singular exception of 5a and 5b, whose opening drops a half-step and is subdued and almost plangent, reflecting their focus on Eve’s fallen womanhood. These verses do invoke that leap from A to E, however, to open their second musical phrases on per consilium and cum vulneribus, where the melody then leaps another fourth from the E up to the octave A, the highest note in the piece. This motif that traverses the octave in just three notes was introduced in the second pair of strophes, where it appears on qua Adam and nec aer. Thus, three of its four uses center specifically on the Fall, with only one transmuted from the Fall to its redemption in the Virgin in strophe 2b, and there in the negative context of contrasting fallen humanity’s earthly begetting with the Virgin’s divine overshadowing.

It is in the variations upon this three-note octave span, moreover, that Hildegard pushes beyond the Fall. The sequence of notes on claritas in nobilissima (last line of 2b), which introduces already a portion of the opening melody of 3a, also contains those three notes (A, E, and the octave A) as anchor points, while another octave span from A to A appears in the melody of de quo Deus formam (“from which God [brought] the form,” 4a), but now with the middle anchor at D. That expansion of the leap to the high A into a fifth is found also on Deus (“God,” 3a), auream (“golden,” 3b), and o laudabilis (“o praise-worthy,” 4b). The high note then finds its most sustained use in the final verses on ventre tuo (“your womb,” 6a) and novum lumen (“a new light,” 6b), completing the divinely-driven redemption of womanhood as the dawn’s light bursts forth from Mary’s golden, praise-worthy womb.

The invocation, modulation, or absence of these musical motifs makes the mirroring of Adam and Eve in this piece particularly striking. They appear to have opposite but complementary roles in passing on the state of fallenness to their posterity of humankind: Adam stripped us of the abundant life in which he was first created, replacing it with a fundamentally different kind of life. Eve, meanwhile, gave that different kind of life its character: one full of grief (plenum dolorem, 5b), of guilt (crimina, 6a), and of harm (nocuisset, 6a). Unusually, however, Hildegard has used the language of the bloom for Adam, rather than for Eve—in 1b, Mary’s flowering (floruisti) is contrasted with Adam’s different mode (in alia vicissitudine) of blossoming, rather than against Eve. This likely reflects one of Hildegard’s unique inversions of the Fall in Scivias II.1, in which Adam’s eating of the forbidden fruit is turned into a failure to pick the flower of obedience—illustrated strikingly in the Rupertsberg manuscript of the work as the same lily that the Virgin Mary holds as her scepter at the top of the choirs of the heavenly symphony in Scivias III.13. This context then informs Hildegard’s inversion in strophe 5b of today’s sequence, in which Eve “pricked her womb / with the wounds of ignorance.” The forbidden fruit of the knowledge of good and evil now has thorns that tear away at the mother’s womb by plunging its pristine procreativity into the dark and painful darkness of death, in which one cannot see or “rise to true knowledge of God” (Scivias II.1.8).

As the blooming branch predestined from the very beginning of creation (3a), the Virgin Mary embodies the opposite images that counter the Fall. The explicit invocation of her eternal predestination together with her Son sets “the eternal counsel” (Ps. 32[33]:11) of the Incarnation against the consilium serpentis (“the serpent’s wicked plan,” 5a). Moroever, the celebration of womanhood as the speculum (“mirror,” 4a) of God’s every beauty recalls another feminine figure and manifestation of that eternal counsel—Sapientia, Divine Wisdom, whom Hildegard paired with the Virgin explicitly in O magna res, a piece whose themes and structure complement today’s sequence. Finally, Hildegard’s favorite image of the Virgin as the dawn “who offered to the human race a light / anew” (6b) articulates her place in rescuing humankind from the darkness of disobedience and thus ignorance.

To address the Virgin Mary as Salvatrix could be seen, from the perspective of modern theology, as problematic, in parallel to the theological contention that swirls over the title Co-Redemptrix, “Co-Redeemer.” It is clear enough from the context of this sequence, however, that Hildegard is not suggesting an independent salvific role for the Virgin. Rather, she is invoking another of her striking gender inversions to express the radical complementarity between feminine and masculine, Mother and Son, in the central event of salvation history. The Virgin’s paradoxically fertile womb is the necessary instrument for mediating the Incarnation, and the blessing that she offers is one of light and life. Moreover, Hildegard strives here to rescue the fullness of divine knowledge—the light from which Adam fell in disobedience, the thorns of ignorance that brought pain to Eve’s womb—from an overly rigid gender stratification that reserves the rationality of wisdom to the male and its emotional effervescence to the female. To paraphrase Scripture, we are wise by rationality alone, but rationality without the light of Love is dead.

Finally, it must be remembered that the concept of salvation is rooted in the physical idea of health: the Latin term salus meant “good health” long before it meant “salvation.” Hildegard had a tendency to use the term polysemously, often and intentionally leaving it ambiguous at times whether salus referred to physical health or spiritual health. Thus, the title Salvatrix invokes the Virgin Mary’s role as healer, as seen for example in O clarissima. Her healing is holistic, reintegrating complementary roles that had fallen apart between Adam and Eve in the Fall. Her blooming branch blossomed with the lily of obedience refused by Adam; and it brought forth the soothing balm that heals those wounds of ignorance and blesses where Eve brought harm, setting the broken limbs (collige membra, 6b) of her Son, the weak and fallen members of Church, and gathering them together “into the heavens’ harmony.”

Commentary: Music and Rhetoric
by Beverly Lomer

A mode
Range: D below the final to A an octave above the final
Setting: almost entirely syllabic, some small neumatic segments, no melismas

In this sequence, the verses are identified with capital letters in the manuscript. In R, the scribe apparently forgot the capital on the verse that begins with, O quam valde plangendum. The sequence is incomplete in D.

Tonal punctuation is fairly straightforward with some exceptions. A is the primary grammatical marker, with E used occasionally. However, many of the phrases where line breaks have been made around E in the transcription are intended to go on. Tick barlines have been inserted to clarify these instances. Our setting of the text employs longer lines (and thus fewer lines per verse) than Newman’s, on account of the musical phrasing.

The opening phrases are anomalous. The salutation, O virga ac diadema (“O branch and diadem”), is outlined by the modal final, A. While a break could be made here, with the next phrase beginning on C, it makes more musical sense to extend the first line to end on B. Line 2, page 1 of the transcription is outlined by G, an unusual choice in this mode.

Line 3, which starts a new verse, begins on G, but the melody is almost identical to line 1. It is more likely that the scribe made an error than not, as Hildegard rarely varies a melodic gesture that is used to open a phrase. The phrase opening is clear on account of the capital letter on Tu. Because the beginning is missing in D, no clarification can be obtained by comparing the sources.

Page 2 of the transcription contains a set of phrases in which E is used as a marking tone. The verse that begins, O quam magnum est in viribus suis latus viri, opens and is outlined by A; the next phrase is also regular. The third segment opens and ends on E. The last opens on the A an octave above the final—not a note generally used by Hildegard to begin a phrase. It might be considered as the conclusion of the previous phrase.

Finally, we see again the ending of a textual idea and some outlining by G on the last page of the transcription, in the last verse. There is no other way to divide this phrase, and the notes are the same in both manuscripts, so they must be considered intentional.

In this piece, Hildegard celebrates Mary’s recovery of the glory of the feminine. The lyrics state that the form of woman was made by God to be the “mirror of all [God’s] beauty and the embrace of all his own creation.” Though she includes the harm wrought by Eve, this is one of those instances in which she mitigates Eve’s guilt by placing the responsibility on the serpent. Eve was not malicious but ignorant and wounded by the evil one. On page 3 of the transcription (verse 5a-b), Hildegard underscores this idea musically. The emphatic melodic motive that begins with the consecutive leaps of a fifth and a fourth to reach the A an octave above the final, appears on both per consilium serpentis and cum vulneribus ignorantie.

Though Hildegard addresses Mary as the Salvatrix in this work, she links it to her act of bearing the new light. Musically, this segment does not receive special emphasis, although the final statement, in which she asks Mary to gather the faithful into celestial harmony, does imply a hint of salvific agency.

Further Resources for O virga ac diadema

Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia, ed. Barbara Newman (Cornell Univ. Press, 1988 / 1998), pp. 128-30 and 277.
Lomer, Beverly R. “Rhetoric and the Creation of Feminist Consciousness in the Marian Songs of Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179).” Ph.D. diss., Florida Atlantic University, 2006.
Lomer, Beverly. Music, Rhetoric and the Sacred Feminine. Saarbrücken, Germany: Verlag Dr. Müller, 2009.
For a discography of this piece, see the comprehensive list by Pierre-F. Roberge: Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) - A discography

Footnotes

^[1]Acta Canonizationis, 9.2:

Hoc idem dicit Hedewigis de Alceia iurata adiciens, quod beata Hildegardis in lecto egritudinis continue fuit ex flagello Dei, nisi cum Spiritu sancto fuit perlustrata, et tunc sequentiam instinctu sancti Spiritus, que sic incipit: “O virga ac diadema,” per claustrum ambulando decantabat. Cum qua concordat custodissa et celleraria iurate.

In Vita Sanctae Hildegardis. Leben der heiligen Hildegard von Bingen. Canonizatio Sanctae Hildegardis. Kanonisasition der heiligen Hildegard, ed. and trans. Monika Klaes, Fontes Christiani 29 (Freiburg et al.: Herder, 1998), p. 256. ↩

Hymn to the Virgin (D 155v [incomplete], R 474v)Back to Table of Contents
by Hildegard of Bingen

1. Ave generosa gloriosa et intacta
puella, tu pupilla castitatis,
tu materia sanctitatis,
que Deo placuit.

2. Nam hec superna infusio in te fuit,
quod supernum Verbum in te carnem induit.

3. Tu candidum lilium quod Deus ante omnem creaturam
inspexit.

4. O pulcherrima et dulcissima,
quam valde Deus in te delectabatur,
cum amplexionem caloris sui in te posuit,
ita quod Filius eius de te lactatus est.

5. Venter enim tuus gaudium habuit
cum omnis celestis symphonia de te sonuit,
quia virgo Filium Dei portasti,
ubi castitas tua in Deo claruit.

6. Viscera tua gaudium habuerunt
sicut gramen super quod ros cadit
cum ei viriditatem infundit, ut et in te factum est,
O mater omnis gaudii.

7. Nunc omnis ecclesia in gaudio rutilet
ac in symphonia sonet
propter dulcissimam Virginem
et laudabilem Mariam,
Dei Genitricem. Amen.

1. Hail, nobly born, hail, honored and inviolate,
you Maiden are the piercing gaze of chastity,
you the material of holiness—
the one who pleasèd God.

2. For heaven’s flood poured into you
as heaven’s Word was clothed in flesh in you.

3. You are the lily, gleaming white, upon which God
has fixed his gaze before all else created.

4. O beautiful, O sweet!
How deep is that delight that God received in you,
when ‘round you he enwrapped his warm embrace,
so that his Son was suckled at your breast.

5. Your womb rejoiced
as from you sounded forth the whole celestial symphony.
For as a virgin you have borne the Son of God—
in God your chastity shone bright.

6. Your flesh rejoiced
just as a blade of grass on which the dew has fall’n,
viridity within it to infuse—just so it happened unto you,
O mother of all joy!

7. So now in joy gleams all the Church like dawn,
resounds in symphony
because of you, the Virgin sweet
and worthy of all praise, Maria,
God’s mother. Amen.

Latin collated from the transcription of Beverly Lomer and the edition of Barbara Newman; translation by Nathaniel M. Campbell.

Commentary: Themes and Theology
by Nathaniel M. Campbell

In this glorious hymn, Hildegard skillfully weaves together several of her most characteristic images and symbols to celebrate the complementary themes of the Virgin Mary’s chaste union with God and her giving birth to God’s Son in the flesh. The perspective of the hymn moves back and forth between the realm of heaven and its eternal symphony, on the one hand; and the Virgin’s womb and its classic symbol, the lily, on the other. The point of contact between the two, then, is when the Heavenly Bridegroom brings the eternal symphony into the Virgin’s joyous bedchamber and the Incarnate Word enters the world in song.

The opening verse sets the tone by marrying the language of the court—to be generosa was to be born of noble stock, and thus to be bred to be “generous”—with the praise of Mary’s untouched chastity. Both elements combine to make her the “material”—matter, mother, and matrix—whose perfect holiness befits the garment that will be crafted from that material (cf. O splendidissima gemma). The second verse then recalls an image from the responsory, O vis eternitatis, of human nature as a garment, soiled by the Fall but “washed and cleansed” of its suffering by the suffering of the Incarnate Christ. Here, Hildegard describes the Word “clothed in flesh” in Mary’s maternal material of holiness, infused (infusio—“flood”) from above (superna).

Verse 3 complements this by offering another image for Mary’s chastity, the gleaming white lily—but the perspective shifts back from the moment of the Incarnation to its eternal predestination. Just as God foresaw before all eternity that his Son would become a human being, so he also looked upon the Virgin’s fertile flower within that same “eternal counsel”, knowing that she would be the vessel for the Incarnation.

The next verse then combines these elements to describe the espousal of God and this predestined Virgin; as Barbara Newman notes, “The chaste eroticism of such lyrics is a characteristic medieval mood, no less fervent for being virginal, nor less delicate for being ardent” (Symphonia, p. 275). The conceptual movement of the first four verses is reinforced by the use of repeated musical motive that first appears with tu materia in the first verse—reaching from the final to the high A an octave above (which occurs in the first four verses only in the context of this motive or its variations), it then descends a note at a time to D before recovering to E. This motive appears also on superna (Verse 2), lilium (Verse 3), in a modified form on dulcissima (Verse 4), and again on caloris sui and quod Filius eius (Verse 4); for further use of this motive, see Beverly Lomer’s commentary below. Mary as matrix and pure, sweet white flower receives from above the heat of a spousal embrace and the sunlight, which issues in the Incarnation.

Verses 5 and 6 shift into a joyous celebration of this union, focused on what have emerged as the two key images: the realm of heaven and its symphony; and the movement from heaven to earth, represented in the flower and the viriditas flooded and infused into it (infundit, echoing the superna infusio of Verse 1). The music in Verse 5 works especially to connect the celestial symphony with the gleam of Mary’s chastity, as it reaches several times to the highest note in the piece, the C an octave and a fourth above the final. Verse 6 then invokes one of Hildegard’s favorite images, of the viridity that sparkles in the early morning light as it reflects off of the beads of dew that have settled on each tender blade of grass.

Finally, in Verse 7, ecclesia receives a modified version of the repeated motive traversing the final and its high A octave, leading the transfer of the office of Virginal Mother from Mary to the Church. The early-morning light is alluded to in the verb rutilet, which literally means “to gleam red” (cf. Cum processit factura), and becomes the setting for the heavenly symphony, which sounded in the Virgin’s womb with the entrance of Christ as “the New Song”, to echo in the Church (Symphonia, p. 275). Here, Hildegard’s particularly sacramental view of music comes to the fore, as she and her nuns would literally fill the Church with music in the course of singing the praises of their Virgin Mother, bringing into being the musical grace of her Son. In singing for the Lord, they became themselves actors in the divine drama, feminine agents of divine power. Indeed, they literally acted out those roles when they performed as the various Virtutes—not just virtues, but emanations of divine power working within the world—in the sung morality play, Ordo Virtutum, that Hildegard composed for them. Moreover, the special veils and crowns with which Hildegard clothed her nuns on high feast days would combine with their liturgical service of song to create a sacramental matrix in which was channeled the perfection of divine grace from the heavenly choirs down to Ecclesia’s choirs of virgins, where they reflected the symphony in the blessed joy of song.^[1]

Commentary: Music and Rhetoric
by Beverly Lomer

A mode
Range: G below the final to C an octave and a fourth above the final
Setting: syllabic and neumatic
Manuscript: unfinished in D, complete in R

As in many of the A mode pieces, here Hildegard extends the range to the C an octave and a fourth above the final. A is the primary tonal marker, and E is also used. There are several textual phrases in the last two verses, however, that cannot be made to fit these parameters. The first two lines of verse 6 (last line of page 2 and first line of page 3 of the transcription) can be understood as a single phrase; the second begins on F, but F should not be understood here as a grammatical marker. On lines 6 and 7 of the final page (verse 7), the lack of clear phrase separation does indeed cause the break to be made after the E on virginem in line 6, thus beginning the next segment with F, a non-common grammatical tone in this mode. Singers might be able to perform these two lines as all one phrase, but if not, then the break makes sense both musically and linguistically at the end of line 6. The last phrase of the piece, Dei genitricem, Amen, begins on G. Though this is also unusual in the A mode, there really is no other way to make the phrase breaks that makes sense.

This hymn begins with a salutation to Mary, which can be interpreted several ways. Textually, the salutation could properly read, Ave generosa, gloriosa et intacta puella. This choice, however, would begin the next segment on C, an unusual grammatical indicator in the A mode. Thus, the transcription renders the salutation across the first two lines. Line 3 of the first verse (tu materia) begins a new musical idea and reaches the A an octave above the final. This signature motive is also placed on several other key words: superna (verse 2, line 5, page 1), candidum lilium (verse 3, line 7, page 1), caloris (verse 4, line 2, page 2), Filius (verse 4,line 3, page 2), viriditatem (verse 6, line 3, page 3), and omnis ecclesia (verse 7, line 5, page 3). Thus Hildegard links the supernal flood from God into Mary’s womb with Mary as the shining lily, greenness (viridity), Ecclesia, heat, and the Son, through the strategic deployment of one musical idea. Not surprisingly, given the significance of music to Hildegard, the melody ascends to the highest pitch, the C an octave and a third above the final, on the phrase, celestis symphonia de te sonuit.

Further Resources for Ave generosa

Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia, ed. Barbara Newman (Cornell Univ. Press, 1988 / 1998), pp. 122 and 275.
Lomer, Beverly R. “Rhetoric and the Creation of Feminist Consciousness in the Marian Songs of Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179).” Ph.D. diss., Florida Atlantic University, 2006.
Lomer, Beverly. Music, Rhetoric and the Sacred Feminine. Saarbrücken, Germany: Verlag Dr. Müller, 2009.
For a discography of this piece, see the comprehensive list by Pierre-F. Roberge: Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) - A discography

Footnotes

^[1] See Nathaniel M. Campbell, “Imago expandit splendorem suum: Hildegard of Bingen’s Visio-Theological Designs in the Rupertsberg Scivias Manuscript,” Eikón / Imago 4 (2013, Vol. 2, No. 2), pp. 1-68, esp. pp. 57-61; accessible online here. ↩

Psalm antiphon for the Virgin (D 155r) by Hildegard of BingenBack to Table of Contents

O frondens virga,
in tua nobilitate stans
sicut aurora procedit:
nunc gaude et letare
et nos debiles dignare
a mala consuetudine liberare
atque manum tuam porrige
ad erigendum nos.

O blooming branch,
you stand upright in your nobility,
as breaks the dawn on high:
Rejoice now and be glad,
and deign to free us, frail and weakened,
from the wicked habits of our age;
stretch forth your hand
to lift us up aright.

Latin collated from the transcription of Beverly Lomer and the edition of Barbara Newman; translation by Nathaniel M. Campbell.

Commentary: Music and Rhetoric
by Beverly Lomer

D mode
Range: A below the final to D an octave above the final
Setting: primarily syllabic, soe neumatic elements and several short melismas

This is one of two pieces (the other being Laus Trinitati) that appear only in the earlier Dendermonde manuscript. Their omission from the expanded collection of the Riesenkodex may simply have been an error, or it may be that Hildegard grew dissatisfied with this piece and intentionally took it out of circulation.

The phrasing in O frondens virga is fairly straightforward. D is used to outline most phrases. Nunc gaude et letare is outlined by A, a secondary important tone. The next phrase, et nos debiles dignare, can be considered as a continuation of the previous idea, but it also continues and is completed by a mala consuetudine liberare, which begins on F on line 6 of the transcription. A tick barline has been inserted in the transcription to clarify. All three are probably too long to sing, so a break can be made at the end of line 4.

O frondens virga recalls the elemental association of the divine feminine with earthly fertility. Mary is addressed as “O blooming branch,” and she is described as standing in her nobility. The image of dawn and its radiance is also invoked. As in Cum erubuerint, Mary’s salvific actions take on a hint of independent agency: “deign to set us frail ones free” and “stretch out your hand to lift us up.” The musical rhetoric is not as powerful in this work. Melodic motives are shared on the words virga, sicut [aurora] and ad erigendum. The high registral pitch occurs on nobilitate, letare and manum. These linkages serve to highlight Mary’s key attributes and actions.

Further Resources for O frondens virga

Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia, ed. Barbara Newman (Cornell Univ. Press, 1988 / 1998), pp. 120 and 274.
Lomer, Beverly R. “Rhetoric and the Creation of Feminist Consciousness in the Marian Songs of Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179).” Ph.D. diss., Florida Atlantic University, 2006.
Lomer, Beverly. Music, Rhetoric and the Sacred Feminine. Saarbrücken, Germany: Verlag Dr. Müller, 2009.
For a discography of this piece, see the comprehensive list by Pierre-F. Roberge: Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) - A discography

Alleluia-verse for the Virgin (R 473vb) by Hildegard of BingenBack to Table of Contents

Alleluia!
O virga mediatrix,
sancta viscera tua
mortem superaverunt
et venter tuus omnes creaturas
illuminavit
in pulchro flore de suavissima integritate
clausi pudoris tui
orto.

Alleluia!
O branch and mediatrix,
your sacred flesh
has conquered death,
your womb all creatures
illumined
in beauty’s bloom from that exquisite purity
of your enclosèd modesty
sprung forth.

Latin collated from the transcription of Beverly Lomer and the edition of Barbara Newman; translation by Nathaniel M. Campbell.

Commentary: Themes and Theology
by Nathaniel M. Campbell

This verse, meant to accompany the singing of the Gospel at Mass, is one of Hildegard’s elegant meditations on the Virgin Mary’s role in salvation history as prefigured in the “flowering branches” of two Old Testament figures (cf. O viridissima virga and O tu suavissima virga): Aaron’s blooming staff (Numbers 17:1-11) and the branch of the root and Tree of Jesse (Isaiah 11:1). The prefiguration was particularly fertile for medieval minds because of the similarity of the two Latin words, virgo (virgin) and virga (branch or rod), and the illustration of salvation history as a tree of life rooted in those patriarchs and blossoming into the Virgin and the fruit of her womb was popular in medieval art.

Springing from that fundamentally verdant image, this verse rings on several themes characteristic of her treatment of the Virgin Mother, images quite familiar from throughout Hildegard’s Marian corpus, e.g. O splendidissima gemma, Hodie aperuit, and Ave generosa. Her blossoming flower breaks forth like the dawn, viscerally aligned with the fruit of her womb bursting forth into the world to redeem it. The elaborate melisma on the opening Alleluia! makes this verse particularly appropriate for use during the Easter season, thus providing an additional parallel between Christ springing up from the fertile ground of Mary’s womb, a flower borne upon the light of dawn, and his rising again from the dead. The even more elaborate melisma that closes the verse on orto—the flower “sprung forth” and “raised”—re-enforces this parallel. Although Hildegard does not explicitly make a play on the parallel of womb and tomb, one cannot help but observe the juxtaposition of enclosure and openness, a paradox shared by Virgin Mother and Buried Life. The exquisite sweetness of the Virgin’s pure wholeness (suavissima integritas) is paradoxically fertile ground for the Savior, precisely because her garden remains modestly closed to the intrusions of sin and lust.

But the most powerful image of this verse, like the final verse of the sequence, O virga ac diadema, is the one that transfers salvific agency directly into the heart and flesh of the Virgin herself: she is the mediatrix, the feminine mediator, and it is her flesh (viscera tua) that overcame death (mortem superaverunt, a theme treated also in Quia ergo femina). Hildegard here invokes one of her most striking gender inversions to express the radical complementarity between feminine and masculine, Mother and Son, in the central event of salvation history. The Virgin’s fertile womb is the necessary instrument for mediating the Incarnation (cf. O clarissima), and she thus becomes the indispensible Mother without whom that mediation of salvation would not have been possible. That salvific power is paradoxically delicate—the tender and beautiful flower of her virgin womb can only mediate death-destroying Life to the world because it remains enclosed and modest.

Commentary: Music and Rhetoric
by Beverly Lomer

E mode
Range: D below the final to G an octave and a third above the final
Setting: melismatic and neumatic

This is a relatively straightforward piece. Phrases are outlined by the final, E, and alternatively by B.

The lengthy salutation begins with an extensive melisma on Alleluia, which is outlined by the modal final. It continues with the line, O virga mediatrix. The two lines of the salutation in the transcription should be considered one phrase, and a tick barline has been inserted to clarify.

The wording is elliptical. Hildegard attributes salvific agency to Mary’s holy womb with the lines, sancta viscera tua mortem superaverunt, et venter tuus omnes creaturas illuminavit. These lines are given more elaborate and thus emphatic musical treatment than the statement that follows, in pulchro flore, which is stated syllabically and thus briefly as opposed to what went before. This is typical of Hildegard’s Mariology in the Symphonia. She assigns a certain independent salvific power to Mary, reinforced by the music, and then adds the conventional, “through her Son” motif, which is downplayed by the melodic substructure. To fully appreciate Hildegard’s subtlety, it is important to keep in mind that music and text are inseparable for her. Thus she appears to skirt the edges of convention in these songs.

Further Resources for Alleluia! O virga mediatrix

Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia, ed. Barbara Newman (Cornell Univ. Press, 1988 / 1998), pp. 124 and 276.
Lomer, Beverly R. “Rhetoric and the Creation of Feminist Consciousness in the Marian Songs of Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179).” Ph.D. diss., Florida Atlantic University, 2006.
Lomer, Beverly. Music, Rhetoric and the Sacred Feminine. Saarbrücken, Germany: Verlag Dr. Müller, 2009.
For a discography of this piece, see the comprehensive list by Pierre-F. Roberge: Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) - A discography

Song to the Virgin (R 474rb-va)Back to Table of Contents
by Hildegard of Bingen

1. O viridissima virga,
ave, que in ventoso flabro sciscitationis
sanctorum prodisti.

2. Cum venit tempus quod tu floruisti in ramis tuis,
ave, ave fuit tibi, quia calor solis in te sudavit
sicut odor balsami.

3. Nam in te floruit
pulcher flos qui odorem dedit
omnibus aromatibus que arida erant.

4. Et illa apparuerunt omnia in viriditate plena.

5. Unde celi dederunt rorem super gramen
et omnis terra leta facta est,
quoniam viscera ipsius frumentum
protulerunt et quoniam volucres celi nidos
in ipsa habuerunt.

6. Deinde facta est esca hominibus
et gaudium magnum epulantium.
Unde, o suavis Virgo, in te non deficit ullum gaudium.

7. Hec omnia Eva contempsit.

8. Nunc autem laus sit Altissimo.

1. O branch of freshest green,
O hail! Within the windy gusts of saints
upon a quest you swayed and sprouted forth.

2. When it was time, you blossomed in your boughs—
“Hail, hail!” you heard, for in you seeped the sunlight’s warmth
like balsam’s sweet perfume.

3. For in you bloomed
so beautiful a flow’r, whose fragrance wakened
all the spices from their dried-out stupor.

4. They all appeared in full viridity.

5. Then rained the heavens dew upon the grass
and all the earth was cheered,
for from her womb she brought forth fruit
and for the birds up in the sky
have nests in her.

6. Then was prepared that food for humankind,
the greatest joy of feasts!
O Virgin sweet, in you can ne’er fail any joy.

7. All this Eve chose to scorn.

8. But now, let praise ring forth unto the Highest!

Latin collated from the transcription of Beverly Lomer and the edition of Barbara Newman; translation by Nathaniel M. Campbell.

Transcription and Music Notes
by Beverly Lomer

G mode
Range: D below the final to F a seventh above the final (unusual)
Setting: primarily syllabic with some neumatic segments

This is one of the few songs that Hildegard composed in the G mode. G is the primary grammatical marking tone. Most of the phrases are clearly organized in accordance with this pitch.

The piece begins with a salutation to Mary, O viridissima virga, which is outlined by G. Ave, which properly belongs with the salutation, begins on G and ends on D. Musically it fits better with the second phrase, que in ventoso flabro sciscitationis. Lyrically, however, it is awkward. The transcription follows the musical lead, but other interpretations are possible.

On page 1, line 5 ends with B but the phrase continues to the end of the next line. It is too long to place on one line, and a tick barline has been inserted for clarity. The opening of the next verse (lines 7 and 8) could also alternatively be rendered as one phrase.

On page 2, lines 7 and 8 are meant to be sung as one phrase. A tick barline has been included to clarify. Moreover, the next line (ullum gaudium) properly belongs with the previous line, as indicated in the text above. It has been separated for purposes of readability and also for length. The three lines might be difficult to sing on one breath and hence a pause can be taken after either of lines 7 or 8.

Further Resources for O viridissima virga

Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia, ed. Barbara Newman (Cornell Univ. Press, 1988 / 1998), pp. 126 and 276-7.
Lomer, Beverly R. “Rhetoric and the Creation of Feminist Consciousness in the Marian Songs of Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179).” Ph.D. diss., Florida Atlantic University, 2006.
Lomer, Beverly. Music, Rhetoric and the Sacred Feminine. Saarbrücken, Germany: Verlag Dr. Müller, 2009.
For a discography of this piece, see the comprehensive list by Pierre-F. Roberge: Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) - A discography

Responsory for the Virgin (D 156v, R 468r, Scivias III.13.1b) by Hildegard of BingenBack to Table of Contents

R. O tu suavissima virga
frondens de stirpe Jesse,
O quam magna virtus est
quod divinitas
in pulcherrimam filiam aspexit,
sicut aquila in solem
oculum suum ponit:

R. Cum supernus Pater claritatem Virginis
adtendit ubi Verbum suum
in ipsa incarnari voluit.

V. Nam in mistico misterio Dei,
illustrata mente Virginis,
mirabiliter clarus flos
ex ipsa Virgine
exivit:

R. Cum supernus Pater claritatem Virginis
adtendit ubi Verbum suum
in ipsa incarnari voluit.

Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui
sancto, sicut erat in principio.

R. Cum supernus Pater claritatem Virginis
adtendit ubi Verbum suum
in ipsa incarnari voluit.

R. O sweetest branch,
you bloom from Jesse’s stock!
How great the mighty power,
that divinity
upon a daughter’s beauty gazed—
an eagle turns his eye
into the sun:

R. As Heaven’s Father tended to the Virgin’s splendor
when he willed his Word
in her to be incarnate.

V. For in God’s mystic mystery,
the Virgin’s mind illuminéd,
the flower bright—a wonder!—
forth from that Virgin
sprung:

R. As Heaven’s Father tended to the Virgin’s splendor
when he willed his Word
in her to be incarnate.

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and the Spirit
Holy, as it was in the beginning.

R. As Heaven’s Father tended to the Virgin’s splendor
when he willed his Word
in her to be incarnate.

Latin collated from the transcription of Beverly Lomer and the edition of Barbara Newman; translation by Nathaniel M. Campbell.

Commentary: Music and Rhetoric
by Beverly Lomer

A mode
Range: E below the final to C an octave and a 3rd above the final
Setting: neumatic with several melismas on key words

It seems that there are several errors in the Dendermonde manuscript that have been corrected in the Riesenkodex version of this responsory. The most significant one is the opening notes. D begins on B, which is highly unlikely in an A mode piece. R gives the opening on A, which is probably correct. The other appears on page 2, line 1 of the transcription, at the opening of the repetendum. While the melody in D might not be an error, R changes it. The phrase, Cum supernus Pater claritatem, ends on G in D, but R lowers the last passage by a third to end on E, which is a more common tonal punctuator in this mode. This solution, however, removes some of the rhetorical import of the reach to the high C, a tone that is not as common in the A mode but which Hildegard often uses for emphasis.

Most phrases are outlined by A, the modal final; E above the final is also used. There are a few places where further interpretation is possible, e.g. page 1 of the transcription, lines 3 and 4. It is possible to continue line 3 to include quod divinitas in one phrase; a tick barline has been inserted there for reference. That would make the next phrase start with, in pulcherrimam filiam aspexit. Though Hildegard does not usually dilute the upward leap of a fifth by the use of a repeated note before, here the extra beat on the preposition would be the intended phrasing for this gesture. Similarly, the opening gesture in the repetendum, Cum supernus Pater claritatem, begins on a single note A and is followed by a pes neume with the leap from A to E; this opening phrase cannot be broken. Although we have sometimes broken the textual syntax to allow the musical opening of the fifth to stand alone in other songs, this song demonstrates that that cannot be a hard and fast rule.

In O tu suavissima virga, Mary pre-exists the Incarnation as a radiant being who was chosen by God on this account. While radiance was traditionally attributed to Mary, here Hildegard hints at an illumination that resonates with primary divinity. God, the eagle, sets His eye on the sun, Mary. The melodic substructure reinforces the association. The highest pitch, C, occurs on the word solem (sun): “divinity gazed upon a beautiful daughter as an eagle turns his eye into the sun.”

An elaboration of the same melody and registral high pitch also fall on claritas in the repetendum, the radiance of the Virgin, with a final iteration of the motive on voluit (willed): “When the heavenly Father noticed the Virgin’s radiance, when he willed his Word in her to be incarnate.” Significantly, these are the only occurrences of this melodic fragment.

Interestingly, in the verse, Hildegard also describes Mary’s mind as illumined, and as a result, she brought forth the flower of the Son. Hildegard insisted that rationality was equally a quality of men and women, and thus the metaphor also serves her larger goal in these songs—the recovery of the original glory of Woman.

Further Resources for O tu suavissima virga

Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia, ed. Barbara Newman (Cornell Univ. Press, 1988 / 1998), pp. 132 and 277-8.
Lomer, Beverly R. “Rhetoric and the Creation of Feminist Consciousness in the Marian Songs of Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179).” Ph.D. diss., Florida Atlantic University, 2006.
Lomer, Beverly. Music, Rhetoric and the Sacred Feminine. Saarbrücken, Germany: Verlag Dr. Müller, 2009.
For a discography of this piece, see the comprehensive list by Pierre-F. Roberge: Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) - A discography

Votive antiphon for the Angels (D 159r, R 468rb-va, Scivias III.13.2a)Back to Table of Contents
by Hildegard of Bingen

O gloriosissimi lux vivens angeli,
qui infra divinitatem
divinos oculos
cum mistica obscuritate
omnis creature aspicitis
in ardentibus desideriis,
unde numquam
potestis saciari:

O quam gloriosa
gaudia illa vestra
habet forma,
que in vobis est
intacta ab omni pravo opere,
quod primum ortum est
in vestro socio,
perdito angelo,
qui volare voluit
supra intus latens
pinnaculum Dei,
unde ipse tortuosus
dimersus est in ruinam,
sed ipsius instrumenta casus
consiliando facture
digiti Dei instituit.

O living light, O angels glorious!
Below divinity,
upon the eyes divine you gaze
within the darkness mystical
of all creation—
in yearnings set alight
where you can ne’er
be quenched nor satiated:

How glorious too
are these, your joys
your form possesses—
that form that in your number
remains untouched by ev’ry wicked deed
that first arose
in your companion,
that now lost angel
who wished to fly
above, within the hidden
pinnacle of God—
then twisted, tortured, he
was plunged into his ruin.
But yet, his fall’s devices
by cunning plot he laid against the craft
of God’s creative finger.

Latin collated from the transcription of Beverly Lomer and the edition of Barbara Newman; translation by Nathaniel M. Campbell.

Commentary: Music and Rhetoric
by Beverly Lomer

Mode: E with a modulation
Range: G below the final E to F an octave and a second above the final
Setting: syllabic and neumatic with several short melismas

This is a musically interesting song in several ways. It begins and ends in E, but the pitch focus changes to A and then to D. Flats have been added, which suggests a temporary transposition. The way in which Hildegard achieves this ‘modulation’ or change of focal pitch is clever. On page 1 of the transcription, E is clearly established as the primary pitch, beginning the piece and outlining the first several phrases. Line 4, page 1 of the transcription, ends on A, and A and E alternate as key tones.

On page 2, line 3, the grammatical indicator becomes D. Line 2 ends on E, which is musically conclusive. However, the text is continued by the conjunction que, which is set to D on line 3. While this would not be unusual, to move to the pitch below the final to set a connecting word, the tonal center now shifts to D. It remains in alternation between D and A until the final line/pitch where it concludes on E, the final that was established in the beginning. According to Julia Smucker, our singer consultant, this feels odd and ‘unresolved.’ In this segment, D could be the plagal version of the A ‘modality,’ which is not used as a conventional mode in this period but appears frequently in Hildegard’s work. Or, alternatively, one could consider a ‘modulation’ to D with A as the plagal. In this case, the addition of the flats above the final E would be consistent with E only in the upper species.

In her transcription, Marianne Richert Pfau ‘regularized’ the piece by moving it up a second. The introduction gives no rationale for the editorial change, and she references the flats only to the Dendermonde manuscript.^[1] Both D and R agree on the pitch changes and generally on the addition of the flats, so it is not likely to have been an error.

The opening salutes the glorious light-giving angels, who are beneath the divinity but gaze on God in “mystical obscurity of all creation” and in “ardent desires.” The verb, aspicitis [gaze] appears on line 6 of the transcription, after the descriptives. In this segment, E clearly outlines the first three phrases, but on line 4, a shift to A occurs. Aspicitis has been given its own line in the transcription because it is clearly outlined by the A below the final and on account of the choice to place it last in the narrative statement. It can be sung with the previous line, however, and Julia recommends thism because the leap of a sixth that would result if it was combined with line 7 would be awkward in performance. In the transcription, the next two lines begin with F. While line 7 could be considered as a continuation/completion of aspicitis, that leaves line 8, which begins also with F on its own. To combine all three would make for quite a long phrase.

On page 2, line 8 is coupled with line 7 to make one phrase, and a tick barline has been inserted for clarity.

Regarding the flats, there are several instances in which a similar melodic fragment has a signed flat and in which it does not. For example, on page 2, note the similarity in melody on forma, intacta, quod and vestro socio. Flats appear only on intacta and vestro. Habet forma is clearly outlined by E and so a flat would not necessarily be indicated. The others appear after the modal change and so it would not be incorrect to add flats on similar segments in the D/A focus segments.

On page 3, D becomes the primary tonal marker until the end, when the last two lines neatly segue back to E.

Further Resources for O gloriosissimi lux vivens angeli

Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia, ed. Barbara Newman (Cornell Univ. Press, 1988 / 1998), pp. 154 and 282-3.
For a discography of this piece, see the comprehensive list by Pierre-F. Roberge: Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) - A discography

Footnotes

^[1] Pfau, Marianne Richert. Hildegard von Bingen, Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum, Volume IV Chants for the Celestial Hierarchy. Bryn Mawr, Pa., Hildegard Publishing Company, pp. 2-4. ↩

Responsory for the Virgin (R R 468rb) by Hildegard of BingenBack to Table of Contents

R. O quam preciosa est
virginitas virginis huius
que clausam
portam habet,
et cuius viscera
sancta divinitas
calore suo infudit, ita
quod flos in ea crevit.

R. Et Filius Dei per secreta ipsius
quasi aurora exivit.

V. Unde dulce germen,
quod Filius ipsius est,
per clausuram ventris eius
paradisum aperuit.

R. Et Filius Dei per secreta ipsius
quasi aurora exivit.

R. How precious is
this Virgin’s sweet virginity,
a closéd
gate
whose womb
divinity most holy with
its warmth has flooded so
a flower sprung within it.

R. The Son of God has come forth from
her hidden chamber like the dawn.

V. And so the sweet and tender shoot—
her Son—
has through her womb’s enclosure
opened Paradise.

R. The Son of God has come forth from
her hidden chamber like the dawn.

Latin collated from the transcription of Beverly Lomer and the edition of Barbara Newman; translation by Nathaniel M. Campbell.

Commentary: Themes and Theology
by Nathaniel M. Campbell

This responsory is an expanded meditation on the themes of the antiphon, Hodie aperuit nobis: the gate, the flower, and the dawn light. It again draws on the imagery of Ezekiel 44:1-3 to envision the Virgin’s chaste womb as the “closed gate” of the Temple whose threshold only the Lord’s Prince could cross. The connection between the Temple gate and the gate behind which Hildegard and her cloistered nuns lived is made here more explicit, as is the symbolic conflation of temple, cloister, garden, and womb. The repetendum and verse in particular elegantly express the happy paradox of Mary’s hidden enclosure as a Virgin—an enclosure physically enacted by Hildegard and her nuns—from which the light of a reopened paradise burst forth.

There is a serene tenderness about this responsory that easily conjures the image of Hildegard herself sitting quietly in her garden, contentedly composing in her heart as her hands tended to the flowers and herbs. The Virgin’s secreta—an elegant expression for her private parts, as it were—are symbolically aligned with the privateness of the garden, a place where Hildegard could go to be alone with God in the viridity of creation. At the same time, there is an undercurrent of chaste eroticism in the tender warmth of God flooding into the Virgin’s womb as the warm sunlight floods into Hildegard’s private garden. The tenderness is reflected in the music’s effortless lightness of touch, which appears even in the octave-and-half run of notes up the scale on sancta divinitatis in the respond, as Hildegard circles round three more times to the A-C-D opening of sancta on infudit, ita, and crevit, a motif that reappears twice in the repetendum.

Transcription and Music Notes
by Beverly Lomer

D mode
Range: A below the final to D an octave above the final
Setting: neumatic and melismatic

D is the primary grammatical marker in O quam preciosa. A is also used. On page 2 of the transcription, the phrase, quod Filius ipsius est, is outlined by G. It can be grouped with the phrase before and the phrase after to make one long statement, or broken up as indicated in the transcription.

The repetendum begins with a single neume D on Et and is followed by a compound one that includes the leap from D to A. The upward leap of a fifth is usually used to indicate the start of a phrase, but in this case, the repetendum must begin with Et. It is likely that the single neume D on Et should be slurred into the leap on Filius. The same doubled initial note before the leap is found in page 1, line 8, on the phrase, quod flos in ea crevit; one could alternatively group quod with the previous phrase and thus begin with flos on the leap.

There is also an alternative way to think about the phrasing of the opening respond: O quam preciosa est virginitas virginis could be sung as one phrase. Huius could then begin the next phrase: huius que clausam. This phrasing would outline the first statement with the modal final, and if one sings it that way, line 8 should probably be adjusted also to begin with flos on the D to A leap. The Latin sense is better served by the phrasing we have used in the transcription, but the freedoms of chanted verse allow interpretive latitude.

Further Resources for O quam preciosa

Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia, ed. Barbara Newman (Cornell Univ. Press, 1988 / 1998), pp. 134 and 278.
For a discography of this piece, see the comprehensive list by Pierre-F. Roberge: Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) - A discography

Votive antiphon for the Virgin (R 466vb-467ra) by Hildegard of BingenBack to Table of Contents

O tu illustrata
de divina claritate,
clara Virgo Maria,
Verbo Dei
infusa,
unde venter tuus floruit
de introitu
Spiritus Dei,
qui in te
sufflavit
et in te exsuxit
quod Eva abstulit
in abscisione puritatis,
per contractam
contagionem de
suggestione diaboli.

Tu mirabiliter abscondisti in te
inmaculatam carnem
per divinam racionem,
cum Filius Dei
in ventre tuo floruit,
sancta divinitate
eum educente
contra carnis iura
que construxit Eva,
integritati copulatum
in divinis visceribus.

Illumined by
God’s clearest brightness,
O Virgin Mary bright,
with the Word of God
infused,
your womb then flourished at
the entrance of
God’s Spirit—
within you
he breathed,
within drew out
the loss of Eve,
a purity cut off and silenced
by that disease
contracted at
the Devil’s sly persuasion.

You wondrously held hid within yourself
a flesh kept undefiled
according to God’s Reason—
for when the Son of God
within your womb was blossomed,
divinity most holy
brought him forth
to abrogate the laws of flesh
establishéd by Eve,
for he was joined to whole integrity
in flesh and womb divine.

Latin collated from the transcription of Beverly Lomer and the edition of Barbara Newman; translation by Nathaniel M. Campbell.

Commentary: Themes and Theology
by Nathaniel M. Campbell

In this antiphon, Hildegard celebrates the restoration of procreative purity and integrity in the Virgin’s womb, prepared to receive and bring forth the flower of the Incarnate God. It is a fitting close to the Marian section of the Symphonia, as it reflects and refracts many of Hildegard’s most characteristic themes for the Virgin. The piece naturally falls into three unequal thematic movements: its first half contrasts the realms of the divine and of the fallen, while the final movement celebrates Mary’s place in mediating the two.

This thematic movement is echoed in the musical setting. In the first third of the antiphon (O tu illutrata…qui in te sufflavit), Hildegard establishes a steady rhythm that repeats a set of several self-contained motifs with various minor variations, including transpositions up or down the scale. Many of the phrases in this first section also begin with leaps of the fourth and the fifth within the plagal octave of A-D-A (for an explanation of the piece’s shifting modalities, see Beverly Lomer’s commentary on the music below). The repetition creates an appropriate atmosphere for meditating upon the steady and self-referential movements of the divinity in its relationship to the Virgin, first in the Father’s light, then in the Son’s Word, and finally in the Spirit’s breath. The mood of the music then shifts as we enter into the drama of Eve’s purity lost to the Devil’s poison, with much less repetition and quicker movement up and down the scale, further emphasized by the temporary shift of tonal outlining to E on contagionem de suggestione diaboli. Finally, in the second half of the antiphon, Hildegard marries these two musical styles by reintroducing the use of repeated motifs (e.g. on in te and carnem) within the wider movement of pitch, especially as the piece reaches a fifth higher on ventre than it had up to that point, to its highest note of the D two octaves above middle C, producing an entire range of two-and-a-half octaves.

Despite the thematic height of the opening lines and their meditation upon the divine power flowing into the Virgin’s womb, that musical height is only reached in the later return to that womb, for a full appreciation of its exaltation can only come in mirrored contrast to the depth of fallenness from which the divinity had to restore it. As in other pieces (e.g. Ave Maria, O auctrix vite, O clarissima, and O virga ac diadema), the symbolic parallels between Eve and Mary were a primary and powerfully fertile locus for Hildegard’s poetic imagination. The key to her exploration of this parallel in this antiphon is Hildegard’s perception that the Virgin’s conception of the Son of God took place in accord with the original, paradisical model of procreation—the state in which Adam and Eve were created, whose “most distinctive feature (…) was the state of integrity—wholeness of mind and body—which includes but transcends physical virginity.” As Barbara Newman continues:

In Paradise, Adam and Eve were indeed free from lust, but their union would not have been without pleasure. Rather, husband and wife would have lain side by side, and they would gently perspire as if sleeping. Then the woman would become pregnant from the man’s perspiration (sudor), and, while they lay thus sweetly asleep, she would give birth to a child painlessly from her side … in the same way that God brought Eve forth from Adam, and that the Church was born from the side of Christ.”^[1]

The gentle and noble beauty of this paradiscal nature is taken up in the Incarnation in Hildegard’s explication of Ps. 44[45]:3, “Beautiful in form above the children of men:”

In Him shines forth beauty, the noblest form free from any spot of sin, without a splash of human corruption, and lacking all desire for the sinful works demanded by fleshly human weakness. None of these ever touched this human. And the body of the Son of Man was born more purely than other people, for the stainless Virgin bore her Son in ignorance of sin, and thus ignorant of the sorrow of childbirth. How? She never felt any stubborn urge to sin, and therefore the pains of childbirth were unknown to her; but the wholeness of her body [corporis sui integritas] rejoiced within her. Oh, how beautiful then His body!
—Scivias III.1.8^[2]

Hildegard explains in greater detail the importance of this paradisical integritas corporis in the Virgin’s salvific role in the figure of Chastity, one of the virtues that appears upon the Pillar of the Savior’s Humanity in Scivias III.8. In the vision itself, this figure of Chastity declares (Scivias III.8.7):

I am free and not fettered, for I have passed through the pure Fountain Who is the sweet and loving Son of God. I have passed through Him, and I have come forth from Him. And I tread underfoot the Devil with his limitless pride, who has prevailed to fetter me. He is alien from me, because I am always in the Heavenly Father.”

Later, Hildegard’s heavenly voice reveals the significance of Chastity’s appearance (Scivias III.8.24):

She is dressed in a tunic purer and more brilliant than crystal, which shines resplendent like water when the sun reflects from it. It is brilliant because of her simple intent, and pure because it is not covered with the dust of burning desire; miraculously strengthened by the Holy Spirit, she is enwrapped in the garment of innocence, which shines in the bright white light [in clarissima albedine] of the Fountain of living water, the splendid Sun of eternal glory.

And a dove is poised over her head, facing her with its wings spread as if to fly. This is to say that Chastity at her beginning, at her head, as it were, is protected by the extended and overshadowing wings of the Holy Spirit; and so she can fly through the Devil’s snares, one after another. For the Spirit comes with the ardent love of holy inspiration to wherever Chastity shows her sweet face.

Therefore too, in her womb as if in a pure mirror appears a pure infant, on whose forehead is written, “Innocence.” For in the heart of this purest and brightest of virtues there lives inviolable, beautiful and sure integrity [integritas]. Its form is immature because it is simple infancy that has integrity; and its forehead, which is to say its knowledge, shows no arrogance and pride but only simple innocence.

And in her right hand she holds a royal scepter, but she has laid her left hand to her breast. This is to say that on the right, the side of salvation, life is shown in Chastity through the Son of God who is the King of all people. And through Him as defender, Chastity confounds the left, the side of lust, and reduces it to nought in the hearts of those who love her.^[3]

This image of virgin Chastity bearing the infant Integrity elaborates the second half of this antiphon, but also brings to mind two other of Hildegard’s compositions for the Virgin that illuminate the first half of the antiphon. Chastity’s gleaming garment shares the properties of reflecting and refracting light that Hildegard attributed to the Virgin in the antiphon, O splendidissima gemma, in which the Virgin’s body is a sparkling gem through which the divine light pours, a lens to focus that light into the world. Moreover, Hildegard’s contrast of the Virgin to Eve’s diseased fall, together with her frequent references to the healing properties of gemstones, focuses our attention on the responsory, O clarissima, in which the Virgin becomes healer dispensing from her womb the balm of salvation.

The disease that the Virgin’s ointment heals is described in this antiphon as the infection that Eve “contracted / at the Devil’s sly persuasion”—her loss of virginal purity, the gleaming garment of a translucid gem that her body was made to be. The word that Hildegard uses to describe that loss of purity—abscisio—carries in Latin the same double meaning that being cut off does in English: it can mean both a literal loss and the loss of the right to speak. This is the shame-faced silence with which humanity’s first fallen parents looked mournfully upon their homeless offspring in the antiphon Cum erubuerint—and it is the silence that was broken in that same antiphon by the Virgin’s clara voce, “crystal voice”. The Virgin’s clarion call reechoed the musical harmony of Adam and Eve’s paradisical speech, silenced by the Devil’s acrimony in the Fall but restored by the Holy Spirit’s inspiration of the prophets and saints. Hildegard’s most powerful theological meditation on this restoration of prelapsarian harmony came in the last year of her life, when she described its paradisical power to overwhelm the devil in the famous (and scathing) letter she wrote to the prelates of Mainz in her attempts to have an interdict lifted from her abbey:

When we consider these things carefully, we recall that man needed the voice of the living Spirit, but Adam lost this divine voice through disobedience. For while he was still innocent, before his transgression, his voice blended fully with the voices of the angels in their praise of God. Angels are called spirits from that Spirit which is God, and thus they have such voices by virtue of their spiritual nature. But Adam lost that angelic voice which he had in paradise, for he fell asleep to that knowledge which he possessed before his sin, just as a person on waking up only dimly remembers what he had seen in his dreams. And so when he was deceived by the trick of the devil [suggestione diaboli] and rejected the will of his Creator, he became wrapped up in the darkness of inward ignorance as the just result of his iniquity.

God, however, restores the souls of the elect to that pristine blessedness by infusing them with the light of truth. And in accordance with His eternal counsel, He so devised it that whenever He renews the hearts of many with the pouring out of the prophetic Spirit, they might, by means of His interior illumination, regain some of the knowledge which Adam had before he was punished for his sin.

And so the holy prophets get beyond the music of this exile [in hoc exsilio] and recall to mind that divine melody of praise which Adam, in company with the angels, enjoyed in God before his fall. For, inspired by the Spirit which they had received, they were called not only to compose psalms and canticles (by which the hearts of listeners would be inflamed) but also to construct various kinds of musical instruments to enhance these songs of praise with melodic strains.
(…)
Consider, too, that just as the body of Jesus Christ was born of the purity [ex integritate] of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit, so, too, the canticle of praise, reflecting celestial harmony, is rooted in the Church through the Holy Spirit. The body is the vestment of the spirit, which has a living voice [vivam vocem], and so it is proper for the body, in harmony with the soul, to use its voice to sing praises to God.^[4]

Commentary: Music and Rhetoric
by Beverly Lomer

Mode: This antiphon changes modal centers and involves variously G, D, A, E, and B. It moves from a start on G/D, to D/A, to E, and finally to B. Some editors have ‘regularized’ these changes by transposing parts of the antiphon, but because the shifting tonalities are very clearly specified in the manuscript, the transcription remains faithful to its source.
Range: A below middle C to D two octaves and a second above middle C
Setting: neumatic, with short melismatic gestures

This antiphon is a most interesting piece in the way it changes modal centers. It appears only in the Riesenkodex, and while the changes seem idiosyncratic, the neumes and clef changes are quite clear. The salutation, O tu illustrata, begins on G and ends on A, as does the next phrase, with a similar melody expanded to a higher range. The third musical line also begins on G, but ends on D. It is possible to interpret these three musical segments as they are divided in the transcription, or as one long phrase that works with both the G mode and its plagal version on D. As the next part begins on that plagal D and then makes use of A as a punctuating pitch, it could be that Hildegard is playing with the sonorities, as A is the plagal version of D.

It remains within these sonorities until page 2, lines 8 and 9 of the transcription (contagionem de | suggestione diaboli), when it briefly moves from A-G to E to outline phrase segments. In the antiphon’s second half, the melody then returns to A for its tonal outliner until page 3, line 3 (cum Filius Dei), where C is introduced as an additional grammatical marker. The modulation gets even more interesting thereafter, as the final line of the antiphon is outlined by B, while the next-to-last line (integritati copulatum, end of page 3) begins on C. It is possible to shift the focus to G and B by ending the previous line at construxit on B and moving Eva to the beginning of the next phrase to make it begin on G rather than C. This would accord better with the last line of the piece, which is outlined by B, but doing so would seriously disrupt the text. This irregular use of C makes little sense theoretically, but perhaps Hildegard was experimenting with changing tonal centers and, given her lack of formal music training and her penchant for throwing in some idiosyncratic gestures, that might be all there is to it.

So as far as performance decisions are concerned, there is room for interpretation. It should be kept in mind that medieval Latin did not prize word order the way modern languages do, and that the language of monastic devotion emphasized certain key themes and images. Hildegard often musically emphasizes the key themes with tonal markings and other emphatic gestures such as leaps, melismas and repeated melodic segments. Therefore, there does not appear to be a definitive ‘version’ of the phrasing here.

Further Resources for O tu illustrata

Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia, ed. Barbara Newman (Cornell Univ. Press, 1988 / 1998), pp. 106 and 270.
Lomer, Beverly R. “Rhetoric and the Creation of Feminist Consciousness in the Marian Songs of Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179).” Ph.D. diss., Florida Atlantic University, 2006.
Lomer, Beverly. Music, Rhetoric and the Sacred Feminine. Saarbrücken, Germany: Verlag Dr. Müller, 2009.
For a discography of this piece, see the comprehensive list by Pierre-F. Roberge: Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) - A discography

Footnotes

^[1] Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Univ. of California Press, 1987), p. 111. ↩
^[2] Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (Paulist Press, 1990), pp. 314-15; Latin text in the edition of Führkötter and Carlevaris, CCCM 43a (Brepols, 1978), pp. 336-7. ↩
^[3] Adapted from the trans. of Hart and Bishop, pp. 445-6; Latin text ed. Führkötter and Carlevaris, CCCM 43a, pp. 510-11. ↩
^[4] Letter 23, Hildegard to the prelates at Mainz. Adapted from The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen. Volume I, trans. Joseph L. Baird and Radd K. Ehrman (Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 76-80; Latin text in Epistolarium I, ed. L. Van Acker, CCCM 91 (Brepols, 1991), pp. 61-6. ↩

Psalm antiphon for the Holy Spirit (D 157r, R 466va) by Hildegard of BingenBack to Table of Contents

Spiritus sanctus vivificans
vita movens omnia,
et radix est in omni creatura
ac omnia de inmunditia abluit,
tergens crimina ac ungit vulnera,
et sic est fulgens ac laudabilis vita,
suscitans et resuscitans
omnia.

The Holy Spirit: living and life-giving,
the life that’s all things moving,
the root in all created being:
of filth and muck it washes all things clean—
out-scrubbing guilty staining, its balm our wounds constraining—
and so its life with praise is shining,
rousing and reviving
all.

Latin collated from the transcription of Beverly Lomer and the edition of Barbara Newman; translation by Nathaniel M. Campbell.

Recording with Psalm 110/111, sung by the nuns of the Abtei St. Hildegard, Eibingen, Germany:

Commentary: Themes and Theology
by Nathaniel M. Campbell

In this opening antiphon of Symphonia’s section devoted to the Holy Spirit (eighth in the Riesenkodex, fifteenth in the Dendermonde, but either way, the first addressed to the third person of the Trinity), Hildegard offers swift, fulsome movement to convey the Spirit’s place, both rooted and rousing, as the source and sustainer of all created life. It is useful, then, to take this piece alongside O virtus Sapientie, as the spiraling movement of Wisdom’s wings propels also this dance through the Holy Spirit’s life-giving action. The mention of the Spirit’s cleansing and wiping away of filth also recalls the responsory, O vis eternitatis, with its movement from the fleshly garments of Adam to the Incarnation; and it is echoed in verse 1b of Hildegard’s sequence, O ignis Spiritus paracliti. In verses 4a-b of that same sequence, Hildegard also expands this antiphon’s treatment of the Holy Spirit as anima mundi, the “World-Soul” that courses through all existence with dynamic vitality.

Although Newman has criticized the syntax of this antiphon for being “clumsy” (Symphonia, ed. Newman, p. 279), the alternation of participles with finite verbs sustains the essential movement of the Spirit’s own dynamis. The participles keep the Spirit’s action continuously in motion, rather than static or discrete. I have tried to maintain that continuous rhythm with the numerous participles in the translation, which also serve to convey another striking feature of this piece: its enumeration of words ending with “a”. Many of these (e.g. omnia, crimina, and vulnera) are neuter plural nouns, while others are feminine singular (e.g. creatura and inmunditia); but they are all connected by their vocalic ending to the key word: vita, “life” (feminine singular).

The thought-movement of the piece takes us from the Holy Spirit as the source of life, paradoxically both moving and the root of all life, to the Spirit’s cleansing and healing action to restore to life that which has been stained and wounded. The repetition of the same musical motif on sanctus (“holy”, line 1) and movens (“moving”, line 2) connects the Spirit’s holiness with its movement in the world—another paradox that juxtaposes the holy as set apart with the holy as synthetic. After a central section meditating upon the Spirit’s succor to cleanse the fetid wounds of fallenness, the antiphon returns to a celebration of the Spirit as giver of life. Another musical repetition links the scrubbing away of guilt (tergens, line 5 / 6 of the transcription) with the Spirit’s shining splendor (fulgens, line 7 / 8 of the transcription), as newly-polished silver gleams in the sunlight.^[1]

A hallmark of Hildegard’s theology of the Spirit is this paradox of the Spirit as eternal root of being, on the one hand, and agent of dynamic metamorphosis on the other. This may reflect Hildegard’s own experience of the religious life, in a way, for her first entrance into the monastery at the Disibodenberg was as an anchoress with Jutta on All Saints’ Day, 1112—the technical terms of their enclosure there forbade them to leave the anchorhold, which was to be their permanent, stable place of service to God for the remainder of their lives. But Hildegard did leave the anchorhold, and in dramatic fashion, leading her community of nuns to an entirely new foundation (the Rupertsberg) around 1150, and traveling widely on preaching tours thereafter. Like the patron of that new foundation, St. Rupert, Hildegard could be the “fresh viridity of God’s creative finger, in which God planted his green vineyard,” precisely because she drew her strength as “a lofty pillar” and “the mountain’s height” that “never shall be laid low at God’s discerning judgment” (from her antiphon to St. Rupert, O viriditas digiti Dei).

Hildegard recognizes in her theology of the Holy Spirit that the power of the Spirit’s rootedness in eternity dynamically overflows into time and throughout the world, vivifying what would otherwise be passive and dead—for the antithesis of life is the immoveable stagnation of death, the failure of the dynamic. This idea of fixed strength overflowing into dynamic, creative life is reflected in the participles in this piece, which keep the Spirit’s action continuous rather than static. Likewise, Hildegard described the strength with which the Spirit endued the Church (confirmation) at Pentecost as one that bursts forth, a powerful and creative actor in the drama of salvation history:

The Father sent [the Holy Spirit] into the world for love of His Son, to enkindle the hearts of His disciples with fiery tongues and make them stronger in the name of the Holy and True Trinity. Before the coming upon them of the Holy Spirit in fire, they were sitting shut up in their house, protecting their bodies, for they were timid about speaking of God’s justice and feeble in facing their enemies’ persecutions. Because they had seen My Son in the flesh, their inner vision was unopened and they loved Him in the flesh, and thus did not see the bright teaching that afterward, when they were made strong in the Holy Spirit, they spread abroad in the world. But by Its coming they were so confirmed that they did not shrink from any penalty, but bravely endured it. And this is the strength of that tower, which strengthened [confirmed] the Church so much that the insane fury of the Devil can never overcome it.
—Scivias II.4.1^[2]

Commentary: Music and Rhetoric
by Beverly Lomer

A mode
Range: G below the final to A an octave above the final
Setting: primarily neumatic with some short melismas

In this antiphon, phrasing is generally straightforward, with A and E serving as the grammatical markers. There are two less regular situations in which F has been designated here as the opening pitch of a line/phrase.

The first incidence is found on line 5 of the first page of the transcription (abluit). This is an interesting segment, as the phrase as given in the transcription begins on F and ends on B with no flat, thus outlining the tritone. Perhaps this was an intentional rhetorical strategy designed to highlight the cleansing power of the Holy Spirit, one of Hildegard’s favorite themes.

It is possible to align this section differently, but it would seriously disrupt any sense of textual order. The musical phrase that begins on ac omnia de inmunditia could continue past abluit to encompass tergens on line 6. Crimina would then begin on the A an octave above the final and the phrase would begin with a downward leap of a fifth—a very unusual opening for Hildegard. Thus ordered, this next phrase would continue to include et sic est on line 7. Such a division would keep the phrases outlined by either A or E, the typical demarcating tones in this mode. However, although word order was less important in medieval Latin than it is in modern languages, this solution would negate any textual phrasing. The music would dominate rather than emphasizing and enhancing the words. Such an interpretation, while not unacceptable, is nevertheless unlikely.

Interestingly, the range of the piece only reaches to the A an octave above the final once in the Riesenkodex, while it attains the highest pitch several times in Dendermonde. The placement of this high A is always associated with a downward leap of a fifth, except in the first line. This melodic gesture can be thought to link the idea of (the root of) life with the cleansing and saving power of the Holy Spirit. The rhetorical emphasis gained by such melodic repetition is not as strong here, however, as it is in other works.

Further Resources for Spiritus sanctus vivificans

Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia, ed. Barbara Newman (Cornell Univ. Press, 1988 / 1998), pp. 140 and 279.
For a discography of this piece, see the comprehensive list by Pierre-F. Roberge: Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) - A discography

Footnotes

^[1] I have elsewhere argued that Hildegard made the intentional and costly choice to illustrate the Rupertsberg manuscript of her Scivias with extensive silver, precisely to symbolize the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit: Nathaniel M. Campbell, “Imago expandit splendorem suum: Hildegard of Bingen’s Visio-Theological Designs in the Rupertsberg Scivias Manuscript,” Eikón / Imago 4 (2013, Vol. 2, No. 2), pp. 1-68, esp. pp. 46-8; accessible online here. ↩
^[2] Adapted from Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), p. 190. ↩

Sequence for the Holy Spirit (D 158, R 473r)Back to Table of Contents
by Hildegard of Bingen

1a. O ignis Spiritus paracliti,
vita vite omnis creature,
sanctus es vivificando formas.

lb. Sanctus es ungendo periculose
fractos, sanctus es tergendo
fetida vulnera.

2a. O spiraculum sanctitatis,
o ignis caritatis,
o dulcis gustus in pectoribus
et infusio cordium in bono odore virtutum.

2b. O fons purissime,
in quo consideratur
quod Deus alienos
colligit et perditos requirit.

3a. O lorica vite et spes compaginis
membrorum omnium
et o cingulum honestatis: salva beatos.

3b. Custodi eos qui carcerati sunt ab inimico,
et solve ligatos
quos divina vis salvare vult.

4a. O iter fortissimum, quod penetravit
omnia in altissimis et in terrenis
et in omnibus abyssis,
tu omnes componis et colligis.

4b. De te nubes fluunt, ether volat,
lapides humorem habent,
aque rivulos educunt,
et terra viriditatem sudat.

5a. Tu etiam semper educis doctos
per inspirationem Sapientie
letificatos.

5b. Unde laus tibi sit, qui es sonus laudis
et gaudium vite, spes et honor fortissimus,
dans premia lucis.

1a. O fire of the Spirit and Defender,
the life of every life created:
Holy are you—giving life to every form.

1b. Holy are you—anointing the critically
broken. Holy are you—cleansing
the festering wounds.

2a. O breath of holiness,
O fire of love,
O taste so sweet within the breast,
that floods the heart with virtues’ fragrant good.

2b. O clearest fountain,
in which is seen the mirrored work of God:
to gather the estranged
and seek again the lost.

3a. O living armor, hope that binds
the every limb,
O belt of honor: save the blessed.

3b. Guard those enchained in evil’s prison,
and loose the bonds of those
whose saving freedom is the forceful will of God.

4a. O mighty course that runs within and through
the all—up in the heights, upon the earth,
and in the every depth—
you bind and gather all together.

4b. From you the clouds flow forth, the wind takes flight,
the stones their moisture hold,
the waters rivers spring,
and earth viridity exudes.

5a. You are the teacher of the truly learned,
whose joy you grant
through Wisdom’s inspiration.

5b. And so may you be praised, who are the sound of praise,
the joy of life, the hope and potent honor,
and the giver of the gifts of light.

Latin collated from the transcription of Beverly Lomer and the edition of Barbara Newman; translation by Nathaniel M. Campbell.

Commentary: Themes and Theology
by Nathaniel M. Campbell

In contrast to Hildegard’s hymn to the Holy Spirit, with its sparse music and taut themes, this sequence bursts into life with overflowing exuberance. At the same time, through Hildegard’s unique recasting of the sequence form, in which “she makes each pair [of versicles] melodically similar, at times identical, yet [with] a trace of asymmetry” (Dronke, Poetic Individuality, p. 158), it maintains a rhythm both steady and dynamic to express the Holy Spirit’s role as root of nature and as anima mundi, “the soul of the world.” (For a more detailed analysis of Hildegard’s melodic development of each versicle pair, see the “Commentary: Music and Rhetoric” below.) The poetry adopts the same paradoxical movement that animates some of Hildegard’s other pieces for the Spirit, especially the antiphon Spiritus sanctus vivificans, which combines the Spirit’s eternally rooted stability—the ground of being—with its dynamic activity. As Peter Dronke notes, this musical “pattern of echo and modification” is “beautifully reflected in the thematic development of the poetry: in each pair of versicles, the images and meaning of the second both mirror and carry forward those of the first” (ibid.).

The opening trope on the triple Sanctus reveals what Newman has called “the delicate balance” of this sequence’s images, as it moves between its Platonic role as “life-giver in the initial bounty of creation” to its grittier role as “source of healing” in “the ‘stricken’ world” (Symphonia, p. 281). This particular movement between grace and fallenness motivates the second and third versicle pairs, which begin, like the second, third, and fourth verses of Hildegard’s hymn O ignee Spiritus, by imagining the Spirit in relation to each of the five senses: the sound of the breath (the “mighty wind” from Acts 2:2), the felt heat of the fire, the taste and smell of divine virtue inspired in human hearts, and finally the contemplative gaze. Each of these physical senses is effortlessly connected to its deeper, spiritual signification—a perfect example of Hildegard’s visionary-poetic capacity to “construct” symbolic landscapes that “show no trace of [the didactic, allegorical, or figural] scaffolding” upon which they rely.^[1] Indeed, verse 2b requires for clarity in translation the addition of some of that scaffolding—in this case, to explain that the indefinite quod (that which “is seen” [consideratur] in the Spirit’s fountain) refers to the opus Dei, “the work of God,” held eternally reflected within the creative divine foreknowledge. As Hildegard explains in the words of Divine Love (Caritas) in Liber Divinorum Operum III.3:^[2]

For I have written humanity, who was rooted in me like a shadow, just as an object’s reflection is seen in water. Thus it is that I am the living fountain, because all creation existed in me like a shadow. In accordance with this reflected shadow, humankind was created with fire and water, just as I, too, am fire and living water. For this reason also, humans have the ability in their souls to set each thing in order as they will. Indeed, every creature possesses this reflected shadow, and that which gives each creature life is like a shadow, moving this way and that.
(…)
And so the living fountain is the Spirit of God, which he distributes unto all of his works. They live because of him and have vitality through him, just as the reflection of all things appears in water. And there is nothing that can clearly see this source of its life, for it can only sense that which causes it to move. Just as water makes that which is in it to flow, so also the soul is the living breath that always pours forth in a human being and makes them to know, to think, to speak, and to work by streaming forth.
(…)
Wisdom drew from the living fountain the words of the prophets and the words of other wise people and of the Gospels, and she entrusted them to the disciples of the Son of God. This she did so that the rivers of living water might flow out through them into the entire world, that they might return humanity to salvation like fish caught in a net. Indeed, the leaping fountain is the purity of the living God, and in it shines his radiant glory. In that splendor God embraces all things with great love, for their shadow appeared, reflected in the leaping fountain before God bade them to come forth in their forms.

And in me, Divine Love, all things shine resplendently, and my splendor reveals the form of creation just as a shadow indicates the form [of its object]; and in Humility, my helper, creation goes forth at God’s bidding. Likewise in humility, God bowed down to me, so that he might refresh those dried-out, fallen leaves in that blessedness by which he can do all things that he wishes. For he had formed them from the earth, and thus he has also freed them after their fall.

As I have noted elsewhere, Hildegard’s symbolic-poetic mode excels in connecting “the highest levels of contemplative knowledge (of divinity itself) with the lowest levels of concrete images and artifacts” as she envisions each particular image in the light of the entire scope of salvation history.^[3] This mode of thought and expression participates in the neoplatonic metaphysics that Hildegard deploys particularly strongly in the fourth pair of versicles of today’s sequence. As Dronke explains (Poetic Individuality, pp. 158-60):

[T]he Spirit is characterized first as an irresistible force that penetrates the universe from without; then, in the complementary half-stanza, as the source of motion and fertility within the natural world. When the pervasive power has moved from the circumference of the cosmos right through to its centre, it becomes the centre-point from which new elemental life radiates.
(…)
The threefold action in [versicle 4a] recalls the functions of the three wings of the virtus Sapientie, as well as perhaps the Neoplatonic triad of processio, conversio, and reditus: the divine force descends and enters into all things, it harmonizes them, and draws them to itself. If here the language associates the powers of the Holy Spirit with those of the Anima Mundi, in the second versicle it links them with those of the goddess Natura. (…) At the same time, these functions, cosmic and terrestrial, complement each other; the movement of the thought and that of the music are shaped by same symmetrical-asymmetrical pattern, the undulation of parallelism and contrast.

In the final pair of versicles, the musical symmetry breaks down, however—5a illuminates the Spirit’s particularly pentecostal task within the teaching life of the Church, while 5b summarizes the sequence in a final burst of praise. Those final “gifts of light,” however, are also the tongues of fire that “through Wisdom’s inspiration” came upon the apostles at Pentecost, and the one trace of melodic parallel in this final verse pair connects “gifts of light” to the joy of the apostolic teaching; they can also be thematically connected to the Holy Spirit’s office as lucerna anime, “lamp of the soul,” in verse 3 of Hildegard’s hymn, O ignee Spiritus.

Commentary: Music and Rhetoric
by Beverly Lomer and Nathaniel M. Campbell

A mode
Range: E below the final to A an octave above the final.
In one instance in D, B an octave and a step above the final occurs, but this could be an error; see below.
Setting: syllabic and neumatic

While some of Hildegard’s sequences (e.g. O virga ac diadema) depart significantly from the traditional form, in which each verse pair shares the same melody, this one shows tighter control, with subtler variations between versicles. The melody in part b of each verse is usually a repetition or variation of the melody in part a, and the phrasing of the music often accords nicely with the textual sense. There are several places in this sequence, however, where parallel melodies create disjunctures in the textual sense of the poetry.

In verse 1a, the melodic phrasing is clearly in harmony with the poetic sense of the text. In its corresponding verse (1b), however, the congruence between text sense and melody is irregular. Keeping in mind once again that word order in the strict sense is not as important in medieval devotional Latin as it is in modern vernacular languages, the decision was made here to follow the musical logic rather than to adhere to the poetic phrasing. Thus, on p. 1 of the transcription, lines 1 and 4, 2 and 5, and 3 and 6, respectively, contain almost literal parallel melodies that are also fairly equal in length. Though this rendering disrupts the poetic sense of verse 1b, the repeated use of the A to E leap at the beginning of the lines and the C,G,A figure at the ends of phrases were interpreted as clues to Hildegard’s melodic intentions. This disruption to the triple Sanctus trope may rhetorically reflect the broken woundedness described in the text.

Verses 2a and 2b (p. 1, last line, through p. 2, line 3; and p. 2, lines 4-7 of the transcription) consist of very short segments, in accordance with the textual sense. However, their second lines (o ignis caritatis and in quo consideratur) begin with C, an unusual note as a tonal marker in this mode. The phrases could be combined in performance if singers prefer. The suggestion would be to combine the first and second lines of each versicle—O spiraculum sanctitatis with o ignis caritatis and O fons purissimus with in quo consideratur. That said, our decisions regarding phrasing of Verses 4a and 4b, which are discussed below, do consider C as a grammatical marker.

On p. 3 of the transcription (verse 3a), line 1 contains what appears to be an error in Dendermonde. The melody ascends from F to B, which is improbable for several reasons. B is an unlikely highest pitch in the A mode, and the movement from F would require the Bb, also suspect, as Hildegard never uses Bb in the upper register. To ascend to the climactic pitch on the less stable flat is equally doubtful. On the other hand, Hildegard sometimes breaks the rules, and the C clef clearly moved in the manuscript for this segment. According to our singer consultant, Julia Smucker, the R version is the more singable.

In verses 3a and 3b, the melodic phrasing as it is rendered in the transcription (p. 3) is uneven in length, in part because of the variation in melody between the pair, and in part because of the use of C as a tonal marker. If performers prefer, the phrase, Custodi eos qui carcerati sunt ab inimici (p. 3, line 2) could be sung together with et solve ligatos (line 3) if the tempo is brisk enough.

The phrasing in verses 4a and 4b is particularly fraught, because of ruptures between melodic parallels, on the one hand, and textual sense units, on the other. As Hildegard is quite consistent in the deployment of parallel melody in this piece (with the exception of the final pair, on which see below), we chose to make the line break between penetravit and omnia in verse 4a (p. 3, lines 5-6) in order to preserve the melodic parallels between the versicles. Although this delineation puts the object (omnia) on a different line from the verb (penetravit) in the first two lines of verse 4a, it preserves the melodic parallels forced by the more distinct syntactical unit of of the second line of verse 4b, lapides humorem habent (p. 4, line 1), which cannot be as easily broken up. From a musical standpoint, this phrasing uses C as a grammatical marker, which, though unusual for this mode, seems to be a common secondary tone in this particular sequence. Moreover, while it would also be possible to combine the first two lines of each versicle into a single phrase, Julia Smucker has indicated that such a phrasing would require a fast tempo and good breath support. An alternative delineation, following Dronke, Poetic Individuality, pp. 158-9, would break each versicle into five lines, phrased around the note pairs A-A, A-A, E-G, G-A, and A-A, thus:

4a. O iter fortissimum,
quod penetravit omnia
in altissimis et in terrenis
et in omnibus abyssis,
tu omnes componis et colligis.

4b. De te nubes fluunt,
ether volat, lapides
humorem habent,
aque rivulos educunt,
et terra viriditatem sudat.

From the standpoint of Latin syntax and poetic style, separating the object, omnia, from its verb, penetravit, in verse 4a is not a significant break in the flow of the text. After the initial salutation, O iter fortissimum, the versicle enters the syntactical subunit of a relative clause, which runs from quod all the way to abyssis, before resetting to the principal clause in the final line of the verse. The three prepositional phrases, in altissimis et in terrenis / et in omnibus abyssis, all belong within the relative clause and describe where the Spirit's powerful course penetrates all things. Placing the object (omnia) and prepositional phrases after the verb gives them special emphasis. This delineation also reveals a particular aspect of the poetry that a more prosaic phrasing would hide: the use of the three different forms of the noun omnis at the beginning of the second, third, and fourth lines, thus emphasizing the Spirit's omnipresent activity.

Verses 5a and 5b, finally, depart from the mirrored pattern of the rest of the sequence, as their first lines are set to different melodies (p. 4, lines 4 and 7), though both begin on F. In verse 5a, F is repeated at the octave to open the second and third phrases (p. 4, lines 5 and 6), while in verse 5b, the octave F also begins the final line (p. 5, line 1), which is a variation of the final line of 5a (p. 4, line 6); while its second line begins on G (p. 4, line 8). In this section, there is an extended discrepancy between the manuscripts. It begins on the word educis (verse 5a, p. 4, line 4) and continues through the word inspirationem on the next line. The melodic motive reaches to the high A, but neither of the versions is consistent with the other melodies in the verse(s) in which the high pitch is reached. Finally, the piece ends on B in Dendermonde and A in the Riesenkodex; the R ending is more likely in the A mode.

Further Resources for O ignis Spiritus paracliti

Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia, ed. Barbara Newman (Cornell Univ. Press, 1988 / 1998), pp. 148-50 and 281-2.
Dronke, Peter. Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages: New Departures in Poetry, 1000-1150 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 157-60.
For a discography of this piece, see the comprehensive list by Pierre-F. Roberge: Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) - A discography

Footnotes

^[1] Peter Dronke, The Medieval Poet and His World (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1984), p. 85. ↩
^[2] Trans. by Nathaniel Campbell, from the Latin text of the Liber Divinorum Operum, ed. A. Derolez and P. Dronke, in CCCM 92 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), pp. 379-81; translation © The Catholic University of America Press, forthcoming. ↩
^[3] See Nathaniel M. Campbell, “Imago expandit splendorem suum: Hildegard of Bingen’s Visio-Theological Designs in the Rupertsberg Scivias Manuscript,” Eikón / Imago 4 (2013, Vol. 2, No. 2), pp. 1-68, esp. pp. 29-30; accessible online here. ↩

[Caritas abundat]Back to Table of Contents
Psalm antiphon for the Holy Spirit as Divine Love (D 157r, R466v)
by Hildegard of Bingen

Karitas
habundat in omnia,
de imis excellentissima
super sidera
atque amantissima
in omnia,
quia summo regi osculum pacis
dedit.

Love
abounds in all,
from the depths exalted and excelling
over every star,
and most beloved
of all,
for to the highest King the kiss of peace
she gave.

Latin collated from the transcription of Beverly Lomer and the edition of Barbara Newman; translation by Nathaniel M. Campbell.

Commentary: Themes and Theology
by Nathaniel M. Campbell

The connection between Divine Love (Karitas or Caritas) and the Holy Spirit is rooted in Christ’s promise of the Paraclete’s coming in the Last Supper discourse. The new commandment, to love each other as Christ has loved us (John 13:34), is followed in the very next chapter:

If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor [in the Vulgate, Paraclitum], to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you.
—John 14:15-17

Like Spiritus sanctus vivificans, this antiphon shares a key thematic with O virtus Sapientie, for in Hildegard’s visionary allegories, Caritas takes her place alongside Sapientia (Divine Wisdom) as a manifestation of the eternal counsel and God’s self-manifestation into creation. She makes her most dynamic and impressive appearance in the opening vision of the Liber Divinorum Operum, where she declares herself in a jumble of different images and metaphors, moving effortlessly from one to the next, never stopping in any one place long, yet often circling back around from a new direction. In each instantiation of this panoply, she reveals herself as the creative, fiery force driving the living dynamics of all creation and its microcosm in the human being:

I am the supreme and fiery force, who sets all living sparks alight and breathes forth no mortal things, but judges them as they are. Flying around the circling circle with my upper wings, that is, with wisdom, I have ordered all things rightly. But I am also the fiery life of the essence of divinity; I flame above the beauty of the fields and I shine in the waters and I burn in the sun, the moon, and the stars. And with the airy wind I rouse to life all things with some invisible life, which sustains all things.

Therefore I, the fiery force, lie hidden in these things, and they burn because of me, just as breath continually moves a human being and a flickering flame exists within the fire. All of these things live in their essences and are not found in death, because I am life. I am also reason, possessing the wind of the resounding Word, through which every created thing was made; and in all these things I blow, so that none of them might be mortal in its nature, because I am life. (…)

But I also fulfill my duty, since all living things are set ablaze from me; and I am uniform life in eternity, which has neither beginning nor ending. God is this life, working and moving itself, and yet this life is one in three forces. Therefore Eternity is called the Father, the Word is called the Son, and the breath connecting these two is called the Holy Spirit, just as God is signified in human beings, in whom are body, soul, and reason.
—Liber Divinorum Operum, I.1.2^[1]

This wide range of images is condensed in this simple antiphon into two key concepts—or perhaps, given the fact that most of Hildegard’s music was likely composed before the Liber Divinorum Operum, it might be better to say that, from the simple articulations of this antiphon was spun the complex web of Caritas’ powerful visionary appearance at the opening of the latter work. Each of these two key concepts is enunciated by a superlative adjective (a construction in which Hildegard revelled and whose rhythms are far more poetic in Latin than in English): Love embraces the cosmos as excellentissima (“most excellent”; in its etymology, the Latin concept of excellence relates to loftiness and height), and God, her royal spouse, as amantissima (“most beloved”).

The first half of the antiphon celebrates the exalted reach of Divine Love from the depths of the abyss to the heights beyond the stars. Because the subtle immensity of her being is the dynamic structuring principle of all levels of created being (habundat in omnia), she connects every link in the neoplatonic chain of being, overflowing from the Divine Source into each successive level. Love’s fundamentally connective office then transforms in the second half of the antiphon into the tender relationship between lover and beloved. While this imagery is classically scriptural, Hildegard here has assimilated a verse from Psalm 85 to reverse the imagery of the opening of the Song of the Songs. While the Bride cries out, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!” (Sg. Sgs. 1:2), in Hildegard’s antiphon, it is Caritas who reaches herself up to kiss the High King with the kiss shared between Justice and Peace in Ps. 85:10 (84:11 in the Vulgate).

The music itself highlights Love’s active giving rather than passive reception by repeating the opening phrase on Karitas almost note-for-note in the long final melisma on dedit ("gave"). As in Spiritus sanctus vivificans, the dynamic paradox that animates the Spirit’s office is the tension between a rooted omnipresence that structures the world—denoted here in the first of the antiphon’s two verbs, habundat—and the constantly moving dynamism of the Spirit’s activity—denoted here in the second verb, dedit. In its guise as Caritas, the Holy Spirit is an active agent of peace—the harmony in and for which the world was created.

That harmony is further reflected in the pervasive homoioteleuton, or repetition at the end of words, of “a”—again, another feature seen in Spiritus sanctus vivificans. As Marianne Richert Pfau has noted (“Music and Text in Hildegard’s Antiphons,” pp. 86-8), the intense repetition of “a” and “i”—the two vowels of the word Karitas itself—becomes wholly intertwined with the musical structure of the piece, in which five (or six, if you include the initial word Karitas) of the eight musical phrases ends on the modal final, D, and with the end-vowel “a” (omnia, excellentissima, sidera, amantissima, and omnia). The final two phrases are the exception—but in this case, the variatio proves the rule. The penultimate phrase ends with pacis and, rather than returning to D, remains high on A, pressing the melody onto the final phrase—a melisma on the first syllable of dedit—which begins and ends on the final while ranging all the way to its octave.

The repetition of final vocalic “a” and its marriage with the musical return to the final of D confirms the thematic structuring of the piece around the two superlative adjectives, which are further highlighted by the range of the music in which they are set. The two musical phrases that contain de imis excellentissima / super sidera also contain the broadest range of the entire piece, from the first appearance of the high D an octave above the final as the third note of de down to the low A on the first syllable of super (repeated on in omnia in the line after next), thus musically mirroring the breadth of Caritas’ ontological dynamic.

Commentary: Music and Rhetoric
by Beverly Lomer

D mode
Range: A below the final to D an octave above the final
Setting: neumatic, with several melismas on key words

Set in the D mode, the antiphon revolves around the focal pitches of D and A, which are typical fulcrum pitches in this mode. The phrasing is straightforward. The opening, Karitas, is outlined by the modal final and carries a substantial melisma, thus endowing it with emphatic significance. While others have titled this piece Karitas habundat, the first word alone could serve as the title here because its melodic structure is so clearly defined by the final of the mode. The second phrase, habundat in omnia, begins on A, as do all of the subsequent phrases until the last two, which both open on D. The penultimate line ends on A, while the final phrase, like the antiphon’s opening, is outlined by the modal final.

Karitas is a favorite figure for Hildegard and plays a large role in the theological books. She receives less emphasis in the songs, with only one dedicated to her. However, some of the attributes assigned to Mary in the Symphonia are consistent with those given to the female allegorical figures in the theological writings.

Further Resources for Karitas habundat

Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia, ed. Barbara Newman (Cornell Univ. Press, 1988 / 1998), pp. 140 and 279.
Pfau, Marianne Richert. “Music and Text in Hildegard’s Antiphons.” (In Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia, ed. Newman), pp. 86-8.
For a discography of this piece, see the comprehensive list by Pierre-F. Roberge: Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) - A discography

Footnotes

^[1] Trans. by Nathaniel Campbell, from the Latin text of Hildegard of Bingen, Liber Divinorum Operum, ed. A. Derolez and P. Dronke, in CCCM 92 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), pp. 47-9. ↩

Votive antiphon for the Trinity (D 157r) by Hildegard of BingenBack to Table of Contents

Laus Trinitati, que sonus et vita
ac creatrix omnium in vita ipsorum est,
et que laus angelice turbe
et mirus splendor archanorum,
que hominibus ignota sunt, est,
et que in omnibus vita est.

Praise to the Trinity—the sound and life
and creativity of all within their life,
the praise of the angelic host
and wondrous, brilliant splendor hid,
unknown to human minds, it is,
and life within all things.

Latin collated from the transcription of Beverly Lomer and the edition of Barbara Newman; translation by Nathaniel M. Campbell.

Commentary
by Nathaniel M. Campbell

In this antiphon, Hildegard grapples with the Trinity with her usual verve—but it remains insufficient to the task and its vitality becomes muddled. (This may perhaps account for the fact that it is one of only two pieces that appear in the earlier Dendermonde manuscript, but which were left out of the later Riesenkodex—the other is O frondens virga.)

Its opening image of the praise owed to the Trinity is connected, in the middle of the antiphon, to the praise of the heavenly host, whose symphony attempts to reflect the Trinitarian mystery. The dominant theme, however, is life, first within the Trinity, and then in God’s every creation. Both the thrice-repeated vita and its musical treatment confirm this point: the cascade of descending notes on vita at the end of the first line (line 2 in the transcription) is redoubled in its third appearance in the final line, which carries the longest melisma of any syllable in the piece and spans every note save one of the antiphon’s complete range.

Around that central conceit of life Hildegard builds a trinity of images—sound, life, and creatrix, the feminine version of the noun creator; yet, Hildegard gives us no indication of how this triplex is to be applied to the persons of the triune God. We know from her vision of the Trinity in the Scivias (Part II, Vision 2) that she did not lack the creativity or nerve to employ innovative images. Indeed, that vision’s supple language is justly famous:^[1]

Scivias II.2: The Trinity.
Rupertsberg MS, fol. 47r.

Then I saw a bright, serene light (serenissima lux), and in this light a human figure the color of sapphire (sapphirini coloris species hominis), which was all blazing with a gentle, red-glowing fire (suavissimus rutilans ignis). And that bright light bathed the whole of the red-glowing fire, and the red-glowing fire bathed the bright light; and the bright light and the red-glowing fire poured over the whole human figure, so that the three were one light in one power of potential.

Hildegard then offers three more analogies for Father, Son, and Spirit respectively:

a stone’s damp viridity (umida viriditas), solidity to the touch (palpabilis comprehensio), and red-sparking fire (rutilans ignis);
a flame’s brilliant light (splendida claritas), scarlet verdure (pupureus viror), and fiery heat (igneus ardor);
a word’s sound (sonus), force or meaning (virtus), and breath (flatus).

In that Scivias vision, the sound of a word signifies the Father; yet, Hildegard also uses sound to signify the Holy Spirit in the hymn, O ignee Spiritus; and in the Liber Divinorum Operum, the term sonus can often signify the sound of the divine Word, that is, the Son. She uses the imagery of life-giving life for the Holy Spirit in Spiritus sanctus vivificans; yet, in today’s antiphon, the entire Trinity subsists within all life, making it difficult to identify the first appearance of vita with any specific divine person. Perhaps most puzzling is Hildegard’s choice to feminize the noun creator into creatrix, a term she uses nowhere else to describe the divinity.^[2] If it is simply a case of matching the grammatical gender of Trinitas, then the masculine gender of sonus remains awkwardly out of joint.

Despite these polyvalencies, we might loosely conjecture an identification of Father with sound, Son with life, and Spirit with creatrix, based on the following conditions: first, the traditional order of the persons; second, the Scivias’ analogy of the word, in which sound corresponds to the Father; and third, the association of the Spirit with creativity in the two antiphons to the Spirit that directly precede Laus Trinitati in the Dendermonde manuscript, Spiritus sanctus vivificans and Karitas habundat.

To make such a conjecture, however, is perhaps to miss the point of Hildegard’s poetical task. The second half of the antiphon strains considerably against textual syntax and constitutes her tacit admission that all of these analogies and images must remain only partially comprehensible, as the reality to which they point remains hidden from human knowledge. As the object of angelic praise, this Trinity recalls the unseen, unknowable void that Hildegard left in the center of the concentric circles that illustrate the nine ranks of the heavenly host in Scivias I.6 (cf. O gloriosissimi lux vivens angeli and O vos angeli). Yet, Hildegard cannot remain wholly silent about this, and her attempt to describe the indescribable in a cataphatic deluge of images recalls the words of one of Walter Chalmers Smith’s most beloved hymns:

Immortal, invisible, God only wise,
In light inaccessible hid from our eyes,
(…)
Great Father of Glory, pure Father of Light
Thine angels adore Thee, all veiling their sight;
All laud we would render, O help us to see:
’Tis only the splendor of light hideth Thee.

Through a fumbling attempt to describe the Trinity in images and an admission of such an attempt's epistemological impossibility, Hildegard returns in the end to the key word on which she can hang some type of certainty: vita, life. Whatever speculative failures might obtain in our attempts to joyously contemplate the Trinity, we can rest assured that the basic fact of life, of existence itself, is the most immediate revelation of the divine.

What does it mean, then, to say that life itself not only reflects but is, in a sense, the Trinity? Divine vitality is not merely one of individual simplicity, but also one of relational complexity. God lives because God lives in community, a sharing of life. The mystery of the Trinity is not merely a paradox around which we try—and repeatedly fail—to wrap our minds. Rather, the Trinity is a vocation to move outside of ourselves, to share our life, our love, our music, and our creativity with others.

Transcription and Music Notes
by Beverly Lomer and Nathaniel M. Campbell

E mode
Range: D below the final to E an octave above the final
Setting: primarily neumatic, short melimas and one long melisma on last word, vita

While the title is given as Laus Trinitati, the first full phrase encompasses line two of the transcription, which ends on the final E. A light pause can be taken at the end of line 1 if a performer so wishes, as this line ends on B, the secondary grammatical marking tone in the mode. The next phrase dips below the final to D on the opening ac, which indicates that the ideas in this phrase are closely related to the previous one; it also ends definitively on E. In using the secondary tone B, the following two phrases contain what might be considered in modern music theory incomplete pauses at the ends of lines 4 and 5.

Line 6 is somewhat ambiguous as far as phrasing is concerned. The text above has broken it into two lines in accordance with the syntactical units, in which the first relative clause of line 6 (que hominibus ignota sunt) is subordinate to the relative clause of lines 4-5; its que refers to the archanorum (“mysteries”) at the end of the previous line, while the verb est completes the relative clause of lines 4-5. The final phrase, que in omnibus vita est, is syntactically at the same level of subordination as the relative clauses of lines 2 and 4-5, all in reference to Trinitati.

Because the line as transcribed begins conventionally on the modal final E and ends on the secondary tone B, it could be sung as one phrase. If one wants to separate the ideas as per the text, then some articulation is required. Musically, the conjunction et can go with either phrase. One option would be to break after it, so that que in omnibus… begins on D, as with line 2. A breath mark has been inserted to offer some guidance.

Further Resources for Laus Trinitati

Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia, ed. Barbara Newman (Cornell Univ. Press, 1988 / 1998), pp. 142 and 280.
For a discography of this piece, see the comprehensive list by Pierre-F. Roberge: Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) - A discography

Footnotes

^[1] Translations adapted from Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), pp. 161-5; Latin text from the edition of Adelgundis Führkötter and Angela Carlevaris, CCCM 43 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1978). ↩
^[2] Its only other appearance in the corpus of her works is in Liber Vitae Meritorum, III.63, where its grammatical gender matches the antecedent impietas to denote the false “creativity” that impiety uses to rearrange and pervert the divine order. ↩

Responsory for the Angels (D 159r-v, R 468v, Scivias III.13.2b)
by Hildegard of BingenBack to Table of Contents

R. O vos angeli
qui custoditis populos,
quorum forma fulget
in facie vestra,
et o vos archangeli
qui suscipitis
animas iustorum,
et vos virtutes,
potestates,
principatus,
dominationes et troni,
qui estis computati
in quintum secretum numerum,
et o vos
cherubin
et seraphin,
sigillum secretorum Dei:

R. Sit laus vobis,
qui loculum antiqui cordis
in fonte asspicitis.

V. Videtis enim
interiorem
vim Patris,
que de corde illius
spirat quasi facies.

R. Sit laus vobis,
qui loculum antiqui cordis
in fonte asspicitis.

R. O angels, you
who guard the peoples in your care
whose form reflects in flash
upon your face;
O archangels, you
who lend your aid
to righteous souls;
O virtues,
powers,
princedoms,
dominations, thrones—
you’re reckoned
in the mystic fifth;
and O you
cherubim
and seraphim,
the seal upon God’s mysteries:

R. Praise be to you,
who glimpse the chamber of the ancient heart
within the fount, the source.

V. For you look into
the Father’s
inner strength—
the breathing of his heart
as of his face.

R. Praise be to you,
who glimpse the chamber of the ancient heart
within the fount, the source.

Latin collated from the transcription of Beverly Lomer and the edition of Barbara Newman; translation by Nathaniel M. Campbell.

Transcription and Music Notes
by Beverly Lomer and Nathaniel M. Campbell

E Mode
Range: G below the final to D an octave and a 7th above
Setting: neumatic and melismatic, with one very long melisma on asspicitis in the respond

Needless to say, this is one of Hildegard’s most elaborate pieces. It displays an extensive pitch range, ornate and extensive melismatic statements and makes liberal use of large intervallic leaps in both directions, including one upward move of a 6th.

Hildegard considered the angels to be the highest ranking personae in the celestial hierarchy, who interacted directly with divinity and whose speech was imitated most closely by music. Thus it is unsurprising that songs to the angels would be exuberant and ecstatic constructions.

O vos angeli opens with the melismatically set salutation, “O you angels,” which is melodically articulated in close range to the final and below to G. The melody extends upwards to the E an octave above the final on the word custoditis [you guard], which refers to the angelic guardianship of humanity, whose form is reflected in the faces of the angels. On page 2 of the transcription, the melody ascends dramatically from the E an octave above the final to D a 7th higher on suscipitis [you receive], which describes the angels as receiving the souls of the just. The highest ranges are again attained on the words principatus [princedoms], and dominationes [dominations] that describe the exalted attributes of the angelic beings.

The phrasing is in this responsory, despite its range changes, is fairly straightforward. The final, E an octave above the final, B, and A are the primary grammatical marking tones, and most phrases are outlined by one of these pitches. When the phrase is too long for one line in the transcription, it is continued to the next line and a tick barline inserted at the end of the phrase.

This piece offers insights on one of the vexing issues in Hildegard’s songs - the question of phrase lengths. Here, it is clear that the lengthy melismas assigned to individual words are intended to be sung on one breath. For example, on page 2 of the transcription, the single words potestates, principatus, and dominationes [et troni] are set to melismas that contain 34 or more notes. This gives us a bit of a clue about tempo, as such long statements would be difficult to sustain on one breath at a slow speed.

The word asspicitis in the respond [page 4] occupies 3 staves in the transcription. Obviously this needs to be broken in performance. The phrasing given here is one possible interpretation. ingers, however, should make breathing spaces according to what works individually for them. If one wants to keep to the standard grammatical markers, one might consider breaking line 4 in the middle between E and B. These are not conjoined neumes, so breathing is possible. It does, however, diminish the significance of the leap some. Again, individual interpretation and choice applies.

Another interesting question brought up by O vos angeli is the manner of performance Hildegard intended. While the respond and the verses would have been sung by different choirs, the extensive pitch range appears in the verses. For example, the melody moves from the lowest to the highest pitch by line 1 of page 2 of the transcription. According to Julia Smucker, some singers might have possessed such a range - as she does. Nathaniel Campbell suggests that another potential division in the first section before the respond would have been to divide each ‘o vos’ statement up, with different singers taking one segment. At any rate, O vos angeli is quite a remarkable work that would have been spectacular in performance.

Hymn to the Holy Spirit (D 157v-158r, R 473rb-vb)Back to Table of Contents
by Hildegard of Bingen

1. O ignee Spiritus, laus tibi sit,
qui in timpanis et citharis
operaris.

2. Mentes hominum de te flagrant
et tabernacula animarum eorum
vires ipsarum continent.

3. Inde voluntas ascendit
et gustum anime tribuit,
et eius lucerna est desiderium.

4. Intellectus te in dulcissimo sono
advocat ac edificia tibi
cum racionalitate parat, que in aureis operibus sudat.

5. Tu autem semper gladium
habes illud abscidere
quod noxiale pomum
per nigerrimum homicidium profert,

6. Quando nebula voluntatem
et desideria tegit,
in quibus anima volat et undique circuit.

7. Sed mens est ligatura voluntatis et desiderii.

8. Cum vero animus se ita erigit,
quod requirit pupillam mali videre et maxillam nequicie,
tu eum citius in igne comburis cum volueris.

9. Sed et cum racionalitas se per mala opera
ad prona declinat,
tu eam, cum vis, stringis et constringis et reducis
per infusionem experimentorum.

10. Quando autem malum ad te gladium suum
educit, tu illud in cor illius refringis
sicut in primo perdito angelo
fecisti, ubi turrim superbie
illius in infernum deiecisti.

11. Et ibi aliam turrim
in publicanis et peccatoribus elevasti,
qui tibi peccata sua cum operibus suis confitentur.

12. Unde omnes creature
que de te vivunt, te laudant,
quia tu preciosissimum
ungentum es fractis et fetidis vulneribus,
ubi illa in preciosissimas
gemmas convertis.

13. Nunc dignare nos omnes ad te colligere
et ad recta itinera dirigere.
Amen.

1. O fiery Spirit, praise to you,
who on the tympana and lyre
work and play!

2. By you the human mind is set ablaze,
the tabernacle of its soul
contains its strength.

3. So mounts the will
and grants the soul to taste—
desire is its lamp.

4. In sweetest sound the intellect upon you calls,
a dwelling-place prepares for you,
with reason sweating in the golden labor.

5. Yet in your hand you always hold the sword
to cut away
the deadly apple offering
its blackened heart—a homicide,

6. when once that cloud reached out
to overshade the will and its desires,
in which the soul takes flight and circles round about.

7. But of the will and of desire the mind serves as the bond.

8. For when the spirit rears itself
to seek to see the evil eye, the gaping maw of wickedness,
then swiftly in your fire do you consume it, when you will.

9. But when the reason strays and, working evil things,
falls flat and low,
then as you will, you draw, constrain, and bring it back
through floods of trials and ordeals.

10. When evil yet its sword against you
draws, you break its blade into its heart—
the thrust against the fallen angel first
you made when into Hell you cast
his tower of pride.

11. Another tower you raised up in its place,
amongst the taxmen and the sinners—
to you their sins they do confess by their own works and deeds.

12. So ev’ry creature, as it takes
its life from you, returns to you its praise,
for you are that most precious balm
for broken, fetid wounds,
transforming them into
most precious gems.

13. Now deign to gather us, to draw us all to you,
and to direct us on the upright course.
Amen.

Latin collated from the transcription of Beverly Lomer and the edition of Barbara Newman; translation by Nathaniel M. Campbell.

Commentary: Themes and Theology
by Nathaniel M. Campbell

The taut themes and often sparse music make this hymn to the Holy Spirit one of Hildegard’s less characteristic, though no less poetic, compositions. Besides the first and last two stanzas, whose dynamic images of fire, music, balm, and gemstones are matched with the music’s only extensive melismas, it is a sparing and often abstract meditation on the Holy Spirit’s role in animating and then rescuing the human psyche.

The opening images of fire and music are drawn from the two key Scriptural images used to describe the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost:

And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.
—Acts 2:2-4

Hildegard’s unique contribution in this hymn is to interpret the “sound…like the rush of a mighty wind” as music, the heavenly symphony whose harmony expresses the perfection of God’s creativity. For Hildegard, the Word of God doesn’t just speak—he sings; and thus, Hildegard’s hymn shares almost sacramentally in the symphonic divine grace, whose musician here is the Holy Spirit.

As Hildegard described to the prelates at Mainz in a letter from the last year of her life, Adam sang with the voice of angels in paradise, but lost the “sweetness of all musical harmony” in the Fall.^[1] That fallenness, and the Holy Spirit’s role in bringing us back from it, forms the subject matter of this hymn’s central verses. As Peter Dronke has noted (Poetic Individuality, p. 155), however, this meditation “on the nature and motivation of human evil” contains “certain overtones of the dominant opening images, fire and music”: both the lamplight of the will (verse 3) and the scorching refiner’s fire burning away the dross of evil (verse 8); and both the sweet music of the intellect’s call upon the Spirit (verse 4) and the Spirit’s swift movements to constrain the wandering soul, as drawing across the lyre’s strings and beating upon the tympanum’s drum (verse 9).

The images of verses two, three, and four interrelate the three classical parts of the soul (will, desire, and mind or intellect) with the five senses: touch in the mind’s vires (v. 2), taste (v. 3), sight in the soul’s lamp (v. 3), hearing in the intellect’s sweet, musical sound (v. 4), and smell in the sweet perfume of reason’s golden labor (v. 4). All of these are bound together in the underlying image of the inspired soul as an edifice, taking its fiery foundations from the Spirit’s touch and mounting up as each sense and operation of the soul works to construct a hallowed dwelling-place for the Spirit.

The next seven verses follow the ups and downs of this once-inspired soul, tempted and pulled to wander away. The building-up of the Spirit within the soul is contrasted in verse 8 with the soul’s selfish desire to build itself up—and because such a puffed-up pride is hollow and without foundation, it ultimately falls flat (v. 9).

Scivias I.2: The Fall.
Rupertsberg MS, fol. 4r.

The imagery of the building itself returns with force in verses 11 and 12, as Hildegard contrasts the prideful tower of the Devil, torn down by the Holy Spirit and cast into Hell, with the tower of contrition and virtue that the Spirit raises in its place among those who repent. The tower of pride is not the only image, however, that Hildegard uses here to illustrate the source of prideful temptation. In verses 5 and 6, she draws on the imagery of her vision of the Fall in the first part of the Scivias (Vision 2): the nebula is the shadowy, misty cloud, the loathsome form the Devil took when he reached out from the smoky pit of Hell to enwrap and infect the candida nubes (“bright white cloud”) of Eve, the mother of the human race.

The mind that the Spirit set ablaze in the human soul in the second verse is supposed to restrain the will and desire from wandering off into this evil land of shadows and dust, as Hildegard tells us in verse 7. But the allure of sin proves too much, and so the Holy Spirit must provide the constraint, drawing the soul back to goodness through the ordeals of the human experience.

Scivias II.4: Tower
of the Holy Spirit.
Rupertsberg MS,
fol. 60r.

The penultimate verse introduces three new images in its final attempt to describe the transforming work of the Holy Spirit within fallen humanity: wounds, gems, and the ointment (ungentum) that transforms the first into the second. Dronke indicates that the liminality of gem and wound has its roots in the Greek term sphragis, which can have both meanings, thus giving rise to common early Christian descriptions of Christ’s wounds as jewels (Poetic Individuality, pp. 155-6). For Hildegard, the gemstone was a lucent and fertile image for the uncorrupted body, as exemplified in the antiphon for the Virgin, O splendidissima gemma. In this hymn to the Holy Spirit, her contribution to this tradition of bejeweled wounds is to connect the ungentum of the chrism, the anointing oil used in Confirmation, with the ungentum of a medicinal balm used to heal wounds. As she writes in the fourth vision of the second part of Scivias, concerning the gifts of the Holy Spirit received in Confirmation:^[2]

But whatever is weakened and confounded by the wounds of the Devil’s advice must be strengthened and adorned by the anointing of oil, that the gaping bloody wound of fleshly desire may be wiped clean.
—Scivias II.4.7

Then, in explaining a portion of the vision text, Hildegard connects the anointing with oil to the adornment of gold with precious stones:

Some of them are adorned with gold color from their foreheads to their feet: for from their beginning in good works to their end in sanctity, they are adorned with the shining gifts of the Holy Spirit by their anointing with chrism in the true faith at the hand of the bishop. How? Just as gold is adorned by having precious stones set into it, so baptism is adorned with the chrism given to those baptized in faith by the hand of the bishop.
—Scivias II.4.6

What starts as simile in the prose text of Scivias gives way to the unmediated mixture of metaphor in the poetry of this hymn. When the Holy Spirit transforms the faithful into the shining gems that adorn the City of God, it also directs them into the paths of righteousness. There, they journey together, built up in the tower of the Holy Spirit which serves to strengthen the Church—the tower that appears in both this hymn and in the aforementioned vision in Scivias above. As with Hildegard’s first antiphon to the Holy Spirit, Spiritus sanctus vivificans, this hymn unites a paradoxical set of images: the firm stability of the tower with the purposed movement of a journey towards righteousness. Fundamentally, the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Christian is to grow strong, not relying on the empty foundations of pride, but strengthened and confirmed in the faith.

Commentary: Music and Rhetoric
by Beverly Lomer

D mode
Range: A below the final to D an octave above the final
Setting: primarily syllabic with some neumatic segments

It is typical for Hildegard to build up to the highest pitch and to align the attainment of the registral peak with the sense of the text. In this piece, D an octave above the final is first reached on the word lucerna (“lamp,” metonymous for light in general, in verse 3 / p. 1, line 9,), and then again on intellectus (“intellect,” verse 4 / p. 1, line 10) and racionalitate (“reason,” verse 4, p. 2, line 2). These are important themes for Hildegard. The high D is also found on malum (“evil,” verse 10, p. 3, last line). Here it is approached by an upward leap of a fifth and concluded with a downward leap of a fifth. This strategy sets the word apart for emphasis and thus provides a musical contrast between the notion of evil and the light of reason.

The salutation, O ignee Spiritus laus tibi sit, is outlined by the modal final, D, but it is composed of two short segments, O ignee Spiritus, which ends on A; and laus tibi sit, which begins and ends on D.

In verse 2, the first phrase is outlined by D, while the next two phrase segments begin on F and end on D. This is a little unusual, but the close similarities between the two phrase units supports this configuration.

In verse 3, we encounter again the issue regarding the placement of the conjunction et, which is set to D and is repeated on that pitch each time it appears. The third phrase, eius lucerna est desiderium, begins with the upward leap of a fifth, which is used throughout the song as an opening gesture. However, this phrase segment is grammatically parallel to the second one, which begins with et, and so that is the rationale for placing the second iteration of et before the leap on p. 1, line 9 of the transcription.

Verse 5 on p. 2 of the transcription presents an interesting variation in the use of modal grammar. In Dendermonde, the first phrase, Tu autem semper gladium, is outlined by D, the final. In Riesenkodex, this phrase ends on A, the fifth. The second phrase segment, habes illud abscidere, begins on the A below the final, while the phrase that follows it, quod noxiale pomum, begins on the fifth above the final.

On p. 4 of the transcription, lines 5 and 6 (the first two lines of verse 11) comprise a single phrase. It is broken up in both the transcription and translation for the sake of clarity, and a tick barline has been inserted at the end of line 6.

Further Resources for O ignee Spiritus

Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia, ed. Barbara Newman (Cornell Univ. Press, 1988 / 1998), pp. 142-6 and 280-1.
Dronke, Peter. Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages: New Departures in Poetry, 1000-1150 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 154-6.
For a discography of this piece, see the comprehensive list by Pierre-F. Roberge: Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) - A discography

Footnotes

^[1] Letter 23, Hildegard to the prelates at Mainz. In The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen. Volume I, trans. Joseph L. Baird and Radd K. Ehrman (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 76-80. ↩
^[2] From Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), pp. 192-3; Latin text in the edition of Adelgundis Führkötter and Angela Carlevaris, CCCM 43 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1978), pp. 164-5. ↩