Musical Compositions

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The Music of Hildegard of Bingen: Sound, Voice, and the Living Light

The musical compositions of Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) occupy a singular place in medieval culture. Emerging from the same visionary imagination that produced her theological and cosmological writings, her music forms one of the largest and most distinctive bodies of liturgical song attributed to a named composer of the Middle Ages—and by far the most substantial known corpus by a medieval woman. Preserved primarily in the great Wiesbaden manuscript known as the Riesencodex, Hildegard’s compositions reveal a sonic theology in which voice, praise, and cosmic order converge.

Hildegard understood music as intrinsic to divine creation. In her writings she describes the universe as resounding with harmony and the human voice as a remnant of the lost music of paradise. Song was therefore not merely ornament to worship but a restoration of humanity’s original consonance with God. This theology of sound underlies her principal musical collection, the Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum (“Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations”), a compilation of more than seventy liturgical chants composed across her lifetime. The collection includes antiphons, responsories, sequences, hymns, and a Kyrie—genres central to the medieval Divine Office and Mass—yet Hildegard’s settings depart strikingly from contemporary chant traditions. Her melodies often soar to unusually high ranges and unfold in long, arching phrases that seem to suspend time, creating an effect of luminous ascent rather than rhythmic propulsion.

Equally distinctive is Hildegard’s poetic language. Her Latin texts are densely imagistic, saturated with light, fire, greenness (viriditas), and feminine symbolism. Many chants praise the Virgin Mary as the flowering branch through whom divine vitality enters the world; others honor saints, ecclesial figures, or theological virtues. Throughout, imagery of growth and radiance echoes the cosmological themes of her visionary works. Music and vision thus share a symbolic vocabulary: what appears in her books as radiant image emerges in her songs as resonant sound.

Hildegard’s most extraordinary musical creation is the morality play Ordo Virtutum (“The Order of the Virtues”), the earliest known liturgical drama with surviving music attributed to a named author. In this work the personified Virtues sing in opposition to the Devil, who alone does not sing but speaks or shouts—a powerful theological gesture in which harmony signifies participation in divine order and its absence marks alienation from it. Likely performed by the nuns of her community, the drama stages the human soul’s struggle and redemption through musical form, making salvation audible as a chorus of virtues. Within the convent at Rupertsberg, Hildegard’s compositions shaped a distinctive sonic environment in which female voices—often constrained in medieval ecclesiastical structures—became privileged instruments of praise and theological expression. (see Gardiner 2019, Altstatt 2021)

Modern scholarship has emphasized the close integration of Hildegard’s music with her visionary theology and monastic context. Barbara Newman’s (1988/1998) pioneering studies demonstrated the symbolic coherence of Hildegard’s musical imagery—particularly themes such as viriditas, celestial harmony, and feminine personifications—within her broader Sapiential vision. Subsequent analyses by Margot Fassler (1998, 2003, 2022) and Marianne Richert Pfau (1997) have highlighted how her melodies extend the expressive range of plainchant through wide ambitus and rhapsodic contour, often interpreted as sonic analogues of visionary elevation. Scholars of medieval liturgy have also placed these compositions within the ritual life of Hildegard’s communities at Rupertsberg and Eibingen, showing how the songs were likely performed for particular feasts and devotional occasions. [1] Taken together, this body of work presents Hildegard’s music not as an isolated artistic achievement but as a sung extension of her visionary exegesis and ecclesial imagination.

The unity of Hildegard’s oeuvre becomes especially clear when her music is read alongside her visionary writings. Just as her cosmology imagines the universe suffused with the lux vivens, her music enacts that radiance in sound: melody, breath, and word participate in the same living vitality that animates stars, plants, and souls. Song becomes cosmological action—a human participation in the harmony of creation. To hear Hildegard’s compositions, then, is to encounter a medieval theology of sound in which voice restores what was lost, praise aligns the human with the cosmos, and music itself becomes a form of illumination.

Notes

[1] See amongst others: Bain 2021, Gardiner 2019, Boyce-Tillman 2014, Choate et al. 2014, Stevens 1998.

Hildegard von Bingen's work

Hildegard of Bingen. Lieder: Faksimile Riesencodex (Hs.2) der Hessischen Landesbibliothek Wiesbaden, fol. 466–481v, ed. Welker, Lorenz. Commentary by Michael Klaper. Elementa musicae 1. Wiesbaden: Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 1998. [Facsimile]

Hildegard of Bingen Ordo virtutum. In Hildegardis Bingensis: Opera minora, ed. Dronke, Peter. Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 226. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007, 505–521.

Hildegard of Bingen Ordo virtutum, ed. Davidson, Audrey Ekdahl. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1985.

Hildegard of Bingen Ordo virtutum, ed. and French trans. Ricossa, Luca. Geneva: Lulu, 2013.

Hildegard of Bingen Ordo Virtutum: A Comparative Edition, ed. Corrigan, Vincent. Lion’s Bay, BC: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 2013

References

Altstatt, Alison. “The Ordo virtutum and Benedictine Monasticism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Hildegard of Bingen, edited by Jennifer Bain, 235-253. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021

Bain, Jennifer. “Music, Liturgy, and Intertextuality in Hildegard of Bingen’s Chant Repertory.” In The Cambridge Companion to Hildegard of Bingen, edited by Jennifer Bain, 209–34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Bain, Jennifer. Hildegard of Bingen and MusicalReception: TheModern Revival of a Medieval Composer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Bain, Jennifer . "Hooked on Ecstasy: Performance 'Practice' and Reception of the Music of Hildegard von Bingen". In The Sounds and Sights of Performance in Medieval and Renaissance Music: Essays in Honour of Timothy J. McGee, edited by Brian Power and Maureen Epp., 253-273. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009.

Boyce-Tillman, June. "Ecologising Music: Hildegard of Bingen", in In Tune with Heaven or Not: Women in Christian Liturgical Music", 95-112. New York: Peter Lang, 2014.

Choate, Tova Leigh, Flynn, William T., and Fassler, Margot. “Hearing the Heavenly Symphony: An Overview of Hildegard’s Musical Oeuvre with Case Studies.” In A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen, edited by Kienzle, Beverly Mayne, Stoudt, Debra L., and Ferzoco, George, 163-192. Leiden: Brill, 2014.

Fassler, Margot E. Cosmos, Liturgy, and the Arts in the Twelfth Century: Hildegard’s Illuminated Scivias. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022.

Fassler, Margot. “Music for the Love Feast: Hildegard of Bingen and the Song of Songs.” In Women’s Voices across Musical Worlds, ed. Jane A Bernstein, 92-117. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003.

Fassler, Margot. “Composer and Dramatist: ‘Melodious Singing and the Freshness of Remorse.’” In Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World, edited by Barbara Newman, 149-175. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Gardiner, Michael. Hildegard von Bingen's Ordo Virtutum: A Musical and Metaphysical Analysis. London: Routledge, 2019.

Newman, Barbara. Ed. Hildegard of Bingen. Symphonia: a Critical Edition of the Symphonia Armonie Celestium Revelationum [symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations], translated by Barbara Newman. 2nd ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998 [1988].

Pfau, Marianne Richert, editor and translator. Symphonia Armonie Celestium Revelationum. 8 vols. Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania: Hildegard Publishing Company, 1997.

Stevens, John. “The Musical Individuality of Hildegard’s Songs: A Liturgical Shadowland.” In Hildegard of Bingen: The Context of Her Life and Thought, ed. Charles Burnett and Peter Dronke, 163-188. London: Warburg Institute 1998.

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