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.
[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. ↩
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.
[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. ↩
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.
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, an 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.
Psalm antiphon for the Virgin (D 154r-v, R 466vb, Scivias III.13.1a) by Hildegard of Bingen
O splendidissima gemma
et serenum decus solis
qui tibi infusus est,
fons saliens
de corde Patris,
quod est unicum Verbum suum,
per quod creavit mundi
primam materiam,
quam Eva turbavit.
Hoc Verbum effabricavit
tibi Pater hominem,
et ob hoc es tu illa lucida materia
per quam hoc ipsum Verbum exspiravit
omnes virtutes, ut eduxit
in prima materia omnes creaturas.
O jewel resplendent
and bright and joyous beauty of the sun
that’s flooded into you—
the fountain leaping
from the Father’s heart.
This is his single Word
by which he did create the world’s
primordial matter,
a motherhood into confusion cast by Eve.
This Word the Father made
for you into a man—
and this is why you are that bright and shining matter,
through which that Word has breathed
forth every virtue, just as he brought forth
all creatures in a primal motherhood.
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 the first piece of the heavenly symphony that Hildegard heard in the final vision of Scivias (III.13), addressed to the Virgin Queen of the celestial choirs. Its opening image, of the sunlight refracting through and reflecting off a gemstone, becomes quite literally a lens through which Hildegard glimpses the entire sway of salvation history, stretching from the prima materia, the primordial material at the beginning of creation, through the disturbance of that matter in the Fall, and finally to the Virgin’s integral role in renewing that material as she bore the Son of God. Two central images emerge: the interaction of sunlight with gemstone, and the polyvalency of materia as both matter and motherhood.
The image of the gemstone situates the Virgin within the complex web of salvation history by calling upon the twelve precious stones that adorned first the breastplate of the high priest of Israel (Exodus 28) and then the walls of the heavenly Jerusalem in John’s vision thereof (Apoc. 21). The manifestation of God’s presence among his people as his City is a classically patristic image (e.g. St. Augustine’s De Civitate Dei), but Hildegard expands its symbolic limits by connecting the Heavenly Jerusalem to the Virgin’s own body as a tabernacle—from the architectural metaphors of the responsory, Ave Maria, O auctrix vite, to the Temple of God with its closed and re-opened door in the antiphon Hodie aperuit, invoking Ezekiel 44.
Scivias I.4: Emobdiment of Soul and Earthly Life. Rupertsberg MS, fol. 22r
The place of this antiphon within the opening of the symphony that closes Scivias also connects its image of the gemstone with the anthropological vision near the start of the work (Scivias I.4), in which Hildegard explored the relationship between soul and body struggling against the temptations of the material world. The vision itself, as well as the allegorical explication of it and the extensive narrative told by the representative “human form”, all identify it as the story of the life and ordeals of an “Everyperson.” It begins with the Everyperson’s conception, as their soul is quickened in the womb of their mother by the flow of divine energy from a golden quadrilateral allegorically identified as “the Knowledge of God.” The iconography of this image in the illustration Hildegard designed for it in the Rupertsberg manuscript draws from common tropes for illustrating the nativity of Christ, with the recumbent mother in the same pose commonly used for the Virgin Mary in childbirth. The use of gold overlaid with red-lacquer to illustrate the divine ensoulment further highlights the particular iconographical valences of the Rupertsberg image, for the manuscript intentionally used such red-gold to illustrate both the Father as one person of the Trinity and to mark the irruptions of his divine activity into creation in the form of one Hildegard’s favorite images, the dawn light.[1]
Hildegard’s design of the image helps the viewer-reader to make a typological connection between the Everyperson’s lament for the weight of their ordeals in life (illustrated to the right of their conception) in Scivias I.4 and their resolution in the opening lyric to the Virgin at the end of the work:
For I should have had a tabernacle adorned with five square gems more brilliant than the sun and stars, for the sun and stars that set would not have shone in it, but the glory of the angels; the topaz would have been its foundation and all the gems its structure, its staircases made of crystal and its courtyards paved with gold. For I should have been a companion of the angels, for I am a living breath, which God placed in dry mud; thus I should have known and felt God. But alas! When my tabernacle saw that it could turn its eyes into all the ways, it turned its attention toward the North; ach, ach! And there I was captured and robbed of my sight and the joy of knowledge, and my garment was torn.
(…)
Oh, who will console me, since even my mother has abandoned me when I strayed from the path of salvation? Who will help me but God? But when I remember you, O mother Zion, in whom I should have dwelt, I see the bitter slavery to which I am subjected. And when I have called to memory the music of all sorts that dwells in you, I feel my wounds. And when I remember the joy and gladness of your glory, I am horrified by the poisons that pollute them.
—Scivias I.4.1[2]
Mother Zion and her bejewled tabernacle full of light and joyous music (which appears at the top of the right-hand column of images in the Rupertsberg illustration) is clearly a type or figure of the Virgin Mother Church, whose halls Hildegard herself filled with music. But as the collective Mother Zion transformed into the collective Mother Church, so the individual and archetypal—but fallen—Mother Eve transformed into the Virgin Mother Mary as temporal instantiations of the divine tabernacle. The first words addressed to Mary in Scivias III.14 praise her as precisely the “resplendent jewel” that was supposed to be the material of the human body, reflecting and refracting the divine light of which the sun and stars are but dim shadows. Her body—transparent and unpolluted—was the perfect chamber for God’s presence that all other human bodies, following the inheritance of Eve, had scorned and vitiated with the darkness and shadow of sin.
The zeal of the poetry highly exalts the Virgin Mary. Although the sun itself is the divine fountain, the source of all, Mary is the sun’s serenum decus, the “bright and joyous beauty” of the sunlight that her lucid body refracts and reflects. Furthermore, in the second half of the antiphon, it is for Mary herself (tibi) that the Father made his Word into a human being—she is the first and singular benefactor of this extraordinary gift, as only the purity of her body and soul were sufficient to receive it. This is the virtue of her gem-like lucidity, the lucida materia that sparkles with the divine presence and allows it to shine forth.
The music, however, mediates this exaltation by establishing different registers for Mary’s creaturliness and God’s divinity. The lower range up to the C above the final (E) is used through most of the piece for the earthly creatures of Mary and Eve, while reserving the range above that C for references to the divine—the Sun itself leaping from the Father’s heart, with saliens the first to leap from the final to the highest note of the piece an octave above, with that high E repeated again always in reference to Father and Word—on quod, the latter two appearances of Verbum, and both Pater and hominem.
The last line of the piece, however, unites the two ranges as materia soars to that top note of E: at last the primordial material of creation returns to its divine source along the same path by which the divine virtutes—the virtues and powers of divine activity—came forth, creating and sustaining, into the world, refracted through the gem-like transparency of Mary’s pure material body. This brings us to the second crucial image with which Hildegard plays in this piece—the polyvalency of materia as not only material but also motherhood. The vitiation of the “primordial matter” came through the chaos provoked by Eve’s fall, punished by the pangs of childbirth and human mortality. The music reinforces this connection, for Eva is set to the same musical phrase but two tones lower as the first half of primam materiam, while turbavit then echoes directly the final phrase of materiam. But the motherhood that Eve’s fallenness cast into confusion, shadow, and darkness was rescued and restored by the Virgin's miraculous bearing of the Son of God.
For Hildegard, the fecundity and fertility of motherhood is a fundamental property of material creation. At one level, this is a consequence of her neoplatonic metaphysics—because all being exists out of the overflow of fecund being from its divine source, all being thus shares in that fundamental property of wanting to overflow, to be creative and recreative and procreative. But in Hildegard’s poetic symbolisms, it is often the more concrete images drawn from the natural world around her that relate this material fecundity with startling and refreshing vitality. In the explicatory chapters of the aforementioned Scivias I.4, she often draws upon such verdant metaphors to explain the relationship between body and soul, thus literally rooting the human person in the creative vitality of the material world. The infant is quickened in the mother’s womb, for example, “just as the earth opens and brings forth the flowers of its use when the dew falls on it” (Scivias I.4.16)[3]—the imagery, of course, parallels Hildegard’s descriptions of Mary’s fecund virginity in, e.g., Ave generosa. Thereafter, the soul and its powers (vires) “give vitality and viridity to the marrow and veins and members of the whole body, as the tree from its root gives sap and viridity to all the branches” (Scivias I.4.16).[4]
It might seem odd, then, that in this antiphon, Hildegard represents this fecund materiality with the image, not of a living organism, but of a gemstone—a piece of rock that would seem to most of us the antithesis of life. In part, this reflects the fact that in Latin, the root meaning of the term gemma is a flower bud—the “gem” of a plant; and Hildegard plays on this polyvalency in other places, e.g. in strophe 1b of her sequence for St. Maximin, Columba aspexit. But the connection goes deeper than that, because for Hildegard, all materiality has a vitality to it, precisely because all materiality participates in its vital creator and source. Thus, she even goes so far as to use a stone as an analogy for the Trinity—in Scivias II.2.5, a stone’s damp viridity (umida viriditas), solidity to the touch (palpabilis comprehensio), and red-sparking fire (rutilans ignis) represent Father, Son, and Spirit, respectively. In that same vision, Hildegard had already seen the Son represented as “a human being the color of sapphire”, and the sapphire returns in the vision of the Eucharist in Scivias II.6 as Hildegard describes the union of Christ’s divinity with the sacramental wine as the physical action of dropping a sapphire into the cup (ch. 13—see the commentary for O clarissima)—thus invoking the use of gemstones as medicinal cures found in the fourth book of her work on natural medicine, Physica. As she notes in the Preface of that fourth book, all stones are born of fire and water, and all are despised by the Devil because they both remind him of his former glory (adorned as he was by their lucid splendor) and, “because it is the nature of certain precious stones to seek those things that are honorable and useful and to reject those that are depraved and evil for humankind, just as the virtues reject the vices and the vices cannot cooperate with the virtues.”[5] Precious stones have their own powers (vires) to choose between good and evil—and it is in their nature to choose the good, for the good is the source of their beauty and light.
The resplendent lucidity of Mary’s jewel-like body is thus a property of her glorious virginal motherhood, which allows the Word to be made flesh in her womb without ever being overtaken by the darkness.
Commentary: Music and Rhetoric by Beverly Lomer
E mode
Range: A below final to E an octave above the final.
Setting: neumatic with short melismas
In the E mode, E and B are the typical grammatical demarcators, but in this work, Hildegard also uses D. The musical strategy is subtle and highlights the key theme, Mary’s radiance and partnership with the Father in salvation.
The salutation, O splendidissima gemma, is outlined by the modal final, E. The next phrase, et serenum decus solis, which elaborates on the first, is broken into two musical parts. The conjunction et, which serves to connect the imagery of the resplendent gem and the bright beauty of the sun, is set to D. Serenum and decus share an opening melodic motive, and solis rises to the C above the final, one of the two signature high points in the piece. Reading the lyrics alone, Mary is described as the resplendent gem, the serene beauty of the sun that was poured into her, referring to the Word, by which the Father created all things and which he gave flesh in the Incarnation. The musical phrasing, however, breaks up this imagery a bit. O splendidissima gemma et serenum decus solis is outlined by the modal final, and the E on which solis concludes offers a definitive cadence. While the use of the final to punctuate a phrase or idea is typical, what Hildegard does next is less usual. She begins the second part of the statement on D with a conjoined neumatic leap to A that identifies it as an opening gesture. The pitch D used in this way is atypical in this mode. Here it serves to create the sense of a new theme, as the second part of the narrative begins. Thus, the musical subtlety presents Mary, radiant with the light of primary divinity, for a fleeting moment as a stand-alone image. The antiphon further emphasizes this singular place of the Virgin when it says that the Father created his Word as man for Mary herself (tibi). A similar image also appears in the repetendum of O tu suavissima virga: “when the father observed the brightness of the virgin, as he wished his word to be incarnated in her.”
After the leap from D to A to begin statement, qui tibi infusus est (“which was poured into you”), the following phrases, fons saliens (“a fountain leaping”) and de corde Patris (“from the Father’s heart”) are conventionally outlined by the modal final, E. The next phrase, quod est unicum Verbum suum (“which is his only Word”), which serves as a textual conclusion of the initial imagery of Mary as the gem and beauty of the sun, also begins on D. Again, we see the image of independent radiance extended musically until this final statement.
Although quod est unicum Verbum suum concludes the first thought, it can also be considered as the beginning of a new segment or idea. It ends on B, and the next phrase, per quod creavit mundi, begins on B. The theme changes to the creation of the world and the images of matter/mother (materia) are introduced. The melody ascends to the E an octave above the final on quod. The high E melody also appears in the unusual phrases, hoc Verbum effabricavit and tibi Pater hominem (“this Word the Father made for you into a man”); the former hoc begins on B, and the latter is outlined by B. This treatment sets the themes apart, thus adding additional musical emphasis.
For Hildegard, Mary not only overturns the damage done by Eve, she recovers the original glory of Woman. The text of the sequence, O virga ac diadema, describes the “form of Woman,” which God made “the mirror of all his beauty and the embrace of his whole creation.” Thus, Mary serves as the model of the original sacrality and beauty of the feminine for the female community. And that model encompasses the notion that Woman/Mary is not a mere passive vessel but rather an active participant in the salvation scheme.
Further Resources for O splendidissima gemma
Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia, ed. Barbara Newman (Cornell Univ. Press, 1988 / 1998), pp. 114 and 272.
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.
[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. p. 55; accessible online here. ↩ [2] Adapted from Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (New York: Paulist Press, 1994), pp. 109-110; Latin text from the edition of Adelgundis Führkötter and Angela Carlevaris, CCCM 43 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1978), pp. 62-3. ↩ [3] Trans. Hart and Bishop, p. 119; ed. Führkötter and Carlevaris, p. 78: “velut terra se aperit et flores fructus sui profert cum ros super eam ceciderit.” ↩ [4] Adapted from Hart and Bishop, p. 120; ed. Führkötter and Carlevaris, p. 78: “quonium viriditatem medullarum ac venarum et omnium membrorurm toti corpori tribuit, velut arbor ex sua radice sucum et viriditatem omnibus ramis dat.” ↩ [5] Hildegard von Bingen, Physica: Liber subtilitatum diversarum naturarum creaturarum, ed. Reiner Hildebrandt and Thomas Gloning (Walter de Gruyter, 2010), p. 229 (Liber IV, Prefatio): “Et sic pretiosi lapides ab igne et ab aqua gignuntur; unde etiam ignem et humiditatem in se habent, et etiam multas vires et multos effectus operum tenent, ita quod plurime operationes cum eis fieri possunt, ea tamen opera que bona et honesta ac utilia homini sunt (...), quoniam natura eorundem pretiosorum lapidum queque honesta et utilia querit, et prava et mala homini respuit, quemadmodum virtutes vitia abiciunt, et ut vitia cum virtutibus operari non possunt.” ↩
R. O clarissima
mater sancte medicine,
tu ungenta
per sanctum Filium tuum
infudisti
in plangentia vulnera mortis,
que Eva edificavit
in tormenta animarum.
Tu destruxisti mortem,
edificando vitam.
R. Ora pro nobis
ad tuum natum,
stella maris, Maria.
V. O vivificum instrumentum
et letum ornamentum
et dulcedo omnium deliciarum,
que in te non deficient.
R. Ora pro nobis
ad tuum natum,
stella maris, Maria.
Gloria Patri et Filio
et Spiritui sancto.
R. Ora pro nobis
ad tuum natum,
stella maris, Maria.
R. O radiant bright,
O mother of a holy medicine,
Your ointments
through your holy Son
you’ve poured
upon the plangent wounds of death,
by Eve constructed
as torture chambers of the soul.
This death you have destroyed
by building life.
R. Pray for us
to your child,
O sea star Mary.
V. O instrument of life
and joyful ornament,
and sweetener of all delights,
that in you will not fail.
R. Pray for us
to your child,
O sea star Mary.
Glory be to the Father and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit.
R. Pray for us
to your child,
O sea star Mary.
Latin collated from the transcription of Beverly Lomer and the edition of Barbara Newman; translation by Nathaniel M. Campbell.
Commentary by Nathaniel M. Campbell and Beverly Lomer
C mode
Range: G below the final to D an octave and one note above the final
Setting: melismatic and neumatic
Key modal tones: C, G
This responsory is closely linked with the one that precedes it in the Dendermonde manuscript, Ave Maria, O auctrix vite. The two might be considered as companion pieces, perhaps to be sung together as the last two of the four responsories sung for matins on a Marian feast day; together, they construct a striking image of the Virgin’s salvific agency. Their most consonant shared theme is Hildegard’s treatment of the paired relationship between Mary and Eve and their respective roles in salvation history, which in both of these pieces uses the peculiar imagery of architecture—Eve constructing one set of buildings, e.g. the “torture chambers of the soul;” and Mary tearing down those mortal halls and building life in their place. The two pieces also share many structural features: well-organized around rhetorical principles, they are both set in the less common C mode, with similar melodic structures (e.g. a highly melismatic opening that gives way to a more neumatic verse of fewer notes). In fact, there are several melodic fragments that involve the high registral pitches that appear and are deployed rhetorically in both pieces.
The lengthy melismas of the opening five lines confirm the piece’s thematic focus on Mary’s role as healer of our mortal wounds, and have also led us to identify the salutation as O Clarissima rather than O Clarissima mater, as it is sometimes given, based on Hildegard’s careful balancing of the musical phrases. O clarissima is outlined by the modal final, C; and both O clarissima and mater begin with the same melodic gesture. To place mater with the first phrase would require that sancte medicine begin with a downward leap from G to C, a gesture that Hildegard does not employ for phrase openings. In addition, it would create unequal phrases between lines 1 and 2 (p. 1) of the transcription. The phrases O Clarissima and mater sancte medicine are similar in length and, in fact, melodic variants of each other.
As in Ave Maria, O auctrix vite, emphasis is placed on Mary’s saving actions. The first rise to the high C above the final occurs on tu ungenta (“you [have poured] ointments”), which receives further emphasis because the pitch is approached and left by leaps. Moreover, this key motive is repeated once in the next line on sanctum Filium (“holy Son”) and twice in the line after that, on infudisti (“you’ve poured”); those third and fourth lines also resemble each other melodically. Although the salvific relationship between Mother and Son is complementary and integral, Hildegard emphasizes the Virgin’s significant agency by doubling the high C motive on infudisti and setting it to the longest melisma thus far: Mary herself pours out the ointment through her Son upon the wounds of death. As in Ave Maria, O auctrix vite, she complements traditional textual elements that emphasize Christ’s Incarnation with a musical emphasis on the role of his Mother.
We see here also Hildegard’s symbolist theological mind in action as she identifies Mary’s mediation of the Incarnation as mother with the doctor’s mediation of the healing powers of medicinal balm. Moreover, the mortal wounds to which she brings her aid—the “torture chambers” built by Eve—are again, as in Ave Maria, O auctrix vite, melodically articulated with the slightly dissonant use of the high D above the final on the phrase que Eva edificavit. In this way, the evocative poetic image of “the wounds of death” themselves lamenting their pain as Eve built them into our torments and tortures is given musical voice.
The resolution of that tension is found in the repetendum, Ora pro nobis ad tuum natum stella maris Maria, which again serves the rhetorical function of summing up or peroratio. It includes all of the key melodic motives that were rhetorically deployed in the respond to construct Mary’s significant salvific agency, thus using the music to graft Hildegard’s more ingenious images of the Virgin as healing balm onto the more traditional image of the star of the sea. Interestingly, the longest and most elaborate melisma is assigned to the word maris (“sea”), perhaps as an additional (musical) metaphor highlighting Mary’s life-giving attributes, or as a play on the etymological link between maris and Maria.
In another structural parallel to Ave Maria, O auctrix vite, in the verse, which offers the rather more conventional imagery of Mary as joyful ornanment and instrument, the melismatic setting of the respond gives way to a neumatic treatment, offering less rhetorical emphasis. Yet in its own way, it amplifies the opening image in its celebration of the Virgin’s healing properties—as the instrument that brings life into the world, her ointments possess the decorous perfume that beautifies the world with its ornament and exudes the very sweetness of its delights. Moreover, Hildegard notes that, in contrast to worldly sweets, which the medieval mind readily recognized would always (and often quickly) pass to bitterness, the Virgin’s sweetness can never fail. Yet Hildegard herself was all too aware of the pain that even the healer could suffer—as Barbara Newman notes, the imagery of medicine likely came easily to Hildegard’s mind because of her own interest in healing and medicinal cures, an interest that may have derived heavily from her own chronic illnesses and infirmities (Symphonia, p. 272). The Virgin Mother’s office as healer works in Hildegard’s symbolist mind in alignment with her own experiences and with Virgin Mother Church’s agency as doctor, healer, and hospital. Thus, the image of Ecclesia as the sweet, aromatic balm for the wounds of her people appears also in Hildegard’s antiphon for the Church, O orzchis Ecclesia.
The sacramental locus of that healing power mediated by both Virgin Mothers—Mary and Ecclesia—is the eucharistic Body of Christ. If we connect today’s imagery of medicine with the image of the virginal body as sparkling gem—as used, for example, in the antiphon to the Virgin, O splendidissima gemma —we arrive at one of Hildegard’s more evocative analogies for the Eucharist in Scivias II.6.13, of medicinal ointment and sapphire (the voice from heaven speaks):
That oblation, by the power of God, is invisibly borne on high and brought back again in an instant, and so warmed by the heat of the Divine Majesty that it becomes the body and blood of God’s Only-Begotten. People do not perceive this mystery with their bodily senses; it is as if someone encased a precious unguent [unguentum] in simple bread and dropped a sapphire into wine, and I then changed them into a sweet taste, so that in your mouth, O human, you could not taste the unguent in the bread or the sapphire in the wine, but only the sweetness [suavem saporem]—as My Son is sweet and mild. What does this mean? The unguent symbolizes My Son, born of the Virgin, Who was anointed with precious ointment. How? He was clothed with holy humanity, which is a precious unguent, pouring so sweetly over the deadly wounds of humans that when they turn back to Him they will no longer putrefy or stink with Adam’s perdition. And the sapphire symbolizes the Divinity in My Son, Who is the Cornerstone; He is meek and humble, for he did not grow from the root of human flesh begotten by a man and a woman, but was miraculously incarnate by My fire in the sweet Virgin, and therefore his body and blood are sweet and delightful for believers to take in.[1]
Hildegard emphasizes that the very sweetness by which this precious unguent heals is Christ's humanity, received from his Virgin Mother. She reiterates this point in the next two chapters (Scivias II.6.14-15), where she explicitly models the priest who performs the Eucharist upon the Virgin Mary. A few chapters later, Hildegard again discusses the Eucharist as medicine, this time in the exegetical context of the Song of Songs (Scivias II.6.21):
“Eat, my friends; drink, and be inebriated, my dearly beloved!” [Song of Songs 5:1] What does this mean? Eat in faith, you who through holy baptism have come to My friendship; for the spilled blood of My Son has purged you from Adam’s fall, and as you chew the true medicine in the body of My Only-Begotten, the repeated deeds of crime and injustice you have done will be mercifully wiped out for you.
Finally, Hildegard’s lengthy exegesis of another verse from the Song of Songs (2:3) in Scivias III.8.16 subtly returns to the eucharistic language of II.6 to explain why the Bride is so enamored of the Bridegroom’s sweet fruit. The faithful soul—which, for Hildegard, can only mean here the virginal soul, unsullied by any earthly spouse as she yearns for her heavenly Bridegroom—declares that, “His sweetest fruit, which I tasted in my soul when I sighed for God, is sweeter to me than all the sweetness of carnal delights I used to feel.” And why is this fruit so sweet, Hildegard asks?
Because He was born of the Virgin, and so has the sweetest savor and the strongest unguent, which He distills like balsam; which is the resurrection unto life, by which the dead have been raised. And that unguent has the healing in it that through His Incarnation cleanses the wounds of sin; for the Incarnation is full of sanctity and sweetness and all the virtues of virginity.
Further Resources for O clarissima
Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia, ed. Barbara Newman (Cornell Univ. Press, 1988 / 1998), pp. 112 and 271-2.
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.
[1] All quotes from Hildegard’s Scivias have been adapted from the Classics of Western Spirituality translation by Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (New York: Paulist Press, 1990); Latin text from the edition of Adelgundis Führkötter and Angela Carlevaris, CCCM 43 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1978). ↩
R. Ave Maria,
O auctrix vite,
reedificando salutem,
que mortem conturbasti
et serpentem contrivisti,
ad quem se Eva erexit
erecta cervice
cum sufflatu superbie.
Hunc conculcasti
dum de celo Filium Dei genuisti,
R. quem inspiravit
Spiritus Dei.
V. O dulcissima atque amantissima
mater, salve,
que natum tuum
de celo missum mundo edidisti:
R. quem inspiravit
Spiritus Dei.
Gloria Patri et Filio
et Spiritui sancto.
R. Quem inspiravit
Spiritus Dei.
R. Hail Mary,
O authoress of life,
rebuilding up salvation’s health,
for death you have disturbed,
that serpent crushed
to whom Eve raised herself,
her neck outstretched
with puffed-up pride.
That serpent’s head you ground to dust
when heaven’s Son of God you bore,
R. on whom has breathed
God’s Spirit.
V. O sweet and most beloved
mother, hail!
Your Son
from heaven sent you gave unto the world:
R. on whom has breathed
God’s Spirit.
Glory be to the Father and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit.
R. On him has breathed
God’s Spirit.
Latin collated from the transcription of Beverly Lomer and the edition of Barbara Newman; translation by Nathaniel M. Campbell.
Commentary by Nathaniel M. Campbell and Beverly Lomer
C Mode
Range: G below the final to D an octave and one note above the final.
Setting: melismatic with some neumatic sections
In the Dendermonde manuscript, the songs to Mary are found between the songs to God and those dedicated to the Holy Spirit, perhaps because Hildegard associated the second person of the Trinity so closely with the woman from whose womb he was born in human flesh. This “irregular” ordering was corrected in the later Riesenkodex, possibly with a view toward eliminating concerns with unorthodoxy that might have come up in the canonization proceedings that were initiated after Hildegard’s death; another possibility, however, is that the Riesenkodex supplemented the hierarchical arrangement with one according to liturgical genre. As hierarchy was a central principle of rhetorical organization and one that Hildegard both accepted and advocated in other contexts, the unusual order of the first three sets of songs in D was not likely to have been accidental. Though Mary only rarely appears as a visionary figure in Hildegard’s theological writings, the sixteen songs addressed to her in the Symphonia are the most dedicated to any one figure.
Beverly Lomer has argued elsewhere that the Marian repertory would have been primarily intended for performance by the nuns of Hildegard’s community, and therefore, unlike the theological books that were written for an outside audience, would have been free from external scrutiny (see Lomer’s work in “Further Resources” below). The unconventional imagery and almost divine agency that Hildegard assigns to Mary in the songs would support this supposition. While the more typical contemporary depiction of Mary’s role was that of mediatrix, in Hildegard’s Mariology, she assumes the status of an essential partner in the redemptory scheme. She is referred to by such fundamental titles as auctrix vite (“authoress of life”) and salvatrix (“Lady Savior,” in O virga ac diadema, verse 6b). Her radiance is both inherent and a derivative of the Son/Sun in her womb. The repetendum of O tu suavissima virga, for example, praises the moment “when the Father observed the brightness (claritas) of the Virgin when he willed his Word in her to be incarnate..” In O splendidissima gemma , Hildegard even makes the Virgin Mary the unique benefactor of the Incarnation’s gift: “This Word the Father made for you (tibi) into a man.”
The responsory Ave Maria, O auctrix vite, because it appears first in the Marian corpus, can be thought of as an introductory summary to this image of Mary as an active, salvific agent that appears in bits and pieces throughout the Marian songs; it also forms a complementary pair with the next responsory, O clarissima. It employs the less common C final, but is highly organized with C and G as the primary tonal markers, by which most phrases and themes are clearly demarcated. The first section, in which Mary’s actions as the “authoress of life” and saving agent are articulated, is set melismatically. In particular, each word of the extended salutation, Ave Maria, O auctrix vite, receives elaborate runs of notes, each outlined by the final of the mode. This emphatic strategy gains further impetus from the upward expansion of the melody on each phrase, attaining the C an octave above the final on vite. Each of Mary’s saving actions—rebuilding salvation (reedificando salutem), confounding death (mortem conturbasti), and crushing and trampling the serpent (contrivisti, conculcasti)—is also set to a lengthy melisma and outlined by the final, C. Although the respond concludes with the programmatic and conventional statement, “when you bore the Son of God from heaven,” the music emphasizes the Virgin’s actions rather than the moment of Incarnation. On the phrase, dum de celo Filium Dei genuisti, the musical setting becomes neumatic, and the tonal outlining of key words is not as prominent. Similarly, in the verse after the repetendum, the more conventional description of Mary as the tender, loving mother receives decidedly less emphatic musical treatment.
The opening respond also showcases one of Hildegard’s most characteristic Marian themes, of the Virgin Mother healing the brokenness brought into the world by the first mother, Eve. The image of Mary treading down and crushing the head of the serpent (contrivisti, conculcasti) is a classic fulfillment of God’s words of punishment to the serpent in Genesis 3:15—but Hildegard adds her own unique spin on the theme by imagining that crushing as the tearing down of the tower of death that Eve constructed as she stretched out her neck “with puffed-up pride” at the serpent’s beckoning. As Hildegard introduces Eve’s place in this drama, the music rises to the high D above the final (on erecta, “outstretched”), which might be regarded as a possible dissonance, because D is not typically deployed for emphasis in C-mode pieces. Though it appears here in a phrase that begins with G, where it would not be as unusual, the phrase ends on the C final, creating an interesting gesture of “dissonance” that is synchronous with Eve’s disturbance of the initial celestial plan. Elsewhere, Hildegard often mitigates Eve’s sin by associating it with her ignorance and placing the blame on the serpent. Here, however, Eve’s pride is contrasted with Mary’s saving act, as the semi-dissonant high D motive that first appears on erecta is repeated on conculcasti (“ground to dust”). In place of Eve’s puffed-up pride, Hildegard imagines Mary, the “authoress” but also “foundress” (the double meaning of auctrix), building up a new edifice, of life and of salvation (vite, salutem). A similar melodic strategy appears in the first half of the respond, where the high C motive that appears first on vite reappears on serpentem, thus contrasting Mary’s authorization of life with the destruction wrought by the serpent. Both of these upper register emphatic melodic motives then appear in the refrain, which serves as a musical peroratio or summing up, recalling the key ideas and images that were associated with them in the narrative as the text of the repetendum suffuses Christ’s Incarnation with the breath of the Holy Spirit. In this way, Hildegard uses the marriage of text and music to keep a constant, connective balance between the integrated roles of Virgin Mother and Incarnate Son in salvation history.
The breath of the Holy Spirit also plays a double role, as that breath both conceived Christ in the Virgin’s womb and propelled the apostles in their mission to found the Church. The relative pronoun quem in the first repetendum refers to Christ, the Filium Deum at the end of the respond; but in its second repetition after the verse, it could just as easily refer to the mundo, “the world” to which the Virgin has given her Son in mission, in complement to John 3:16 and thus fulfilling the promise of the Spirit to the world in John 14:17-26. Subtle shifts in the reference of the repetendum between respond and verse are characteristic of Hildegard’s responsories (see e.g. O vis eternitatis), and she often paraphrases Scripture in her Marian lyrics, with the Virgin taking the active, feminine role in complement to the masculine role of God (see e.g. Quia ergo femina). The Virgin’s role in the incarnational and salvific “mission to the world” (missum mundo) is one that Hildegard understood her own order of virgins to especially imitate in the course of salvation history. Thus, as Barbara Newman has noted, architectural imagery is frequent in Hildegard’s music in part because Hildegard herself was engaged in refounding and rebuilding a monastery that had fallen into ruin and neglect (the Rupertsberg, to which she moved her community of nuns in 1150), as well as later founding a daughter house across the river at Eibingen (Symphonia, p. 271). But there is a deeper theological significance here, as well, for Hildegard’s symbolist theological mind connects the first mother (Eve), Christ’s virgin mother (Mary), the virgin mother Church, and the Church’s heavenly exemplar and future perfection, the Heavenly Jerusalem. Mary thus serves as the “architect” for the Church, the City of God’s People, whose hallmark is life.
For Hildegard, each of these female faces were (and are) manifestations of the divine and “eternal counsel” (Ps. 32[33]:11), that is, God’s eternal and predestined will that his Son would be incarnate. This theme appears also in several of Hildegard’s pieces to the Father and Son (e.g. O vis eternitatis and O quam mirabilis est), for it was a key of her theological vision. With the Marian pieces in her oeuvre, Hildegard explores the feminine faces of that irruption. The eternally predestined irruption of divinity into time was mediated from the very beginning by the archetypal mothers and their procreative potential—a motherhood shaken by the pain of sin through Eve, renewed into life through Mary, and perpetuated in history by Mother Church.
Further Resources for Ave Maria, O auctrix vite
Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia, ed. Barbara Newman (Cornell Univ. Press, 1988 / 1998), pp. 110 and 271.
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.
Lomer, Beverly. “Hildegard of Bingen: Music, Rhetoric and the Divine Feminine,” in Journal of the International Alliance of Women and Music, vol. 18, No. 2, 2012.
