Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) and her Music Drama Ordo virtutum: A Critical Review of Scholarship and Some New Suggestions

Abstract

Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) composed her magnificent music drama Ordo virtutum, which Peter Dronke rediscovered to international acclaim in 1970, in the early 1150s. Hildegard wrote a first draft, without melodies, at the end of Scivias, her first visionary work, completed in 1151. The Ordo virtutum (best rendered ‘The Play of Divine Powers’) is not an early Morality play, but a unique convent drama celebrating monastic virginity (after the Soul succumbs to the snarling Devil, the only character not to sing - Hildegard’s master stroke, sixteen convent ‘Virtues’ save her). Towards the end of her life, Hildegard was able to engage a highly skilled music scribe (probably one of her nuns working in the Rupertsberg scriptorium) who entered the eighty-three chants she composed for the text into the so-called Riesenkodex (c. 1175-79) in the most advanced form of notation then known (neumes on clefed four-line staves), thus preserving her music for generations to come. Hildegard’s nuns most likely performed the Ordo several times, in various ways: as liturgical cantata (Barbara Newman; striking absence of stage directions), preceding the bishop’s Mass for veiling novices (Pamela Sheingorn), in the more private setting of the chapter house (Gunilla Iversen), or in costumes (Scivias-illuminations) as a fully staged music drama in the convent church (not until about 1165).