The Greenest Branch

Synopsis of the Opera

The Inception of The Greenest Branch

Prospectus - Towards Producing the Opera (Coming Soon)

This opera, currently in development, explores the life of 12th c. Frankish nun and magistra (abbess) Hildegard of Bingen as she weaves vision, passion, philosophy, and political savvy with fine art, poetry, music, drama, natural history, and the healing arts in an ever-expanding mystic cosmology.

Notes on Hildegard von Bingen For The Greenest Branch (Viridissima Virga) An opera

by Mary Lin and Ben Sargent

Hildegard von Bingen was born in 1098 two years after the start of the First Crusade, in the Rhineland, considered the "Main Street" of Europe not only because of its position at the confluence of the Rhine and Rhone rivers but also of cultural streams from both East and West, North and South.

The tenth child of a noble Frankish family, she was sickly, visionary and
 psychic. Hildegard was given to "the church" as a tithe at the age of seven, as she described it in her autobiographical and semi-autobiographical writings. In all likelihood she was initially sent to live with female relatives renowned for their healing and visionary
 gifts at the Sponheim landhold in Bad Kreuznach (literally, crossing place at the healing springs), now a spa community but renowned as a healing center as far back as the Hallstat period, well before Roman times.

Hildegard was anchorited at the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg with her cousin Jutta of Spondheim, a visionary and healer in her own right, when Jutta was 20 and Hildegard was 14. To be anchorited was to agree to be ceremonially walled into a hut or room, usually adjacent to a church, for the duration of one’s life, thus consecrating one’s days to prayer and demonstrated renunciation of all earthly life.

Anchoriting was not an uncommon occurrence, but for women it held special significance. Women were considered dangerous in the Middle Ages, needing to be contained not only for the sake of others, but their own safety. Undertaken by both men and women, anchoriting was merely an extreme form of this containment, a form of sacrifice, one that the truly devout could capitalize on by becoming something of an icon and attraction for the monastery, inspiring others with his or her extreme devotion.

Abbess Hroswitha of Gandersheim wrote a series of plays in the century before Hildegard based on Roman plays of Terence for the amusement of the women in her own abbey which clearly demonstrated reasons for anchoriting, including penance for loose behavior and disobedience as well as extreme devotion. Shortly before her anchoriting, Jutta, apparently one of the most beautiful women of the region, had attempted to make pilgrimage to Spain and had been dissuaded by the local Bishop. She had also refused to marry. One can only imagine the dire options offered by her royal family and local clergy after this of events that would impel her to choose a life of hair shirts; starvation; exposure to cold; self-flagellation with a knotted cord; and bondage, living with a heavy metal chain forged around her torso, in constant pain, in the dark cell or cottage which she and Hildegard and possibly several other girls were interred.

24 years later, at the age of 38 after Jutta’s untimely death from starvation, Hildegard emerged from her cell at Disibodenberg to be unanimously named abbess (technically magister, since she was never formally conferred that title) to the expanding host of young women at the Abbey drawn no doubt by the fame of the two women seeresses interred there.

She went on to found two monasteries and to become a composer, writer of the first musical
 morality play with formally composed music, poet, physician, author of two books on healing and natural history (such as it was at the time), and a visionary psychic. In the fruitful second half of her life Hildegard oversaw the illumination of manuscripts with her wild visions; and counseled priests, popes, an Emperor and other royals, and ordinary people, both in person and through her voluminous and visionary correspondence. She was politically active in her correspondence and engaged in speaking tours in her sixties that in part fueled the antipathy towards the Gnostic Cathars that grew, after her death, into the Albigensian Crusade.

Hildegard created a highly original cosmology populated with female deities who had as
 much in common with the traditional Norse deities of the region of the world
 where she lived as they did with Marianic (Virgin Mary) symbolism of the Catholic tradition. In Norse/Germanic cosmology, Goddesses were of sky, Gods of earth. Hildegard’s visions of celestial, airy, Sapientia (wisdom), Ecclesia (the mother church) and other embodiments of piety and virtue invoke a thread of folklore that would have rung true with people of the Rhine, more so than the images of mother as earth and matter (Mother/Mater/Matter) which infuse the Christian tradition, influenced by the Mesoapatamian (Inanna and Ershkegal) and Greek and Roman traditions (Gaia, Demeter).

Well before Roman times, and well into Hildegard’s lifetime, in the Germanic and Norse countries lived seeresses, called volvas in the Norse tradition, who foretold the future and carried a magical wand or knife which was used to draw or cast spells in the air. The tradition of veiled spells in magical, invented languages, often using runes and made up alphabets, even today lives on and is remembered by custodians of this historic tradition.

Hildegard, widely regarded as the Sybil (seeress, healer) of the Rhine in her day, likely employed cheironomic conducting of her music – a tradition of conducting music by use of hand gestures indicating movement and placement of the notes. She created her own language and alphabet, the Lingua Ignota and Litterae Ignota, respectively, the latter bearing suspicious resemblance to Marcomannic (Mainland Germanic) runes of her Frankish forebears, which themselves were closely related to other runes of the region, including Viking.

A central symbolism in her dense and richly sensual poetry, which she set to music, was the virga – the smallest unit of musical note used in the system of notation of her time, but also Latin for branch, or wand, as well as, in her highly conflated imagery, the Virgin, (Virgo). Hildegard inspired her acolytes and nuns with the image of themselves as conduits and conductors of the magical greening, healing power deep in Nature (Viriditas), chosen and consecrated for such by her purity and devotion through her consecration and spiritual marriage to the Christ, as a conductor of spiritual power.

Regardless of the terminology she used, and religious devotion notwithstanding, all else about Hildegard described a magician, enchantress, or even early European alchemist. As noted, in the Norse tradition, spells were drawn in the air – literally tracing runes. Perhaps cultural traces of memory of this tradition, if not overtly known to Hildegard through the folklore of the region, fueled her aura of magical power. We can only imagine the spell she cast over those who visited the monastery at Disbodenberg and later, her abbeys at Bingen and Eibigen, across the Rhine from one another, on feast days, observing her conducting, perhaps with her viridissima virga – greenest branch -- her assembled beauties, virgins (nobles all) who she dressed in rich costume and jeweled studded gold rings and circlets, their hair flowing down under costly white veils, as they sang and moved in formation to her passionately erotic songs for the holy offices.

One can only imagine the lengths to which an abbess of the time would need to go to keep the interests of spoiled young women, removed from the amusements of society, and to translate attitudes of earthly entitlement into a sense of spiritual elitism as magical virgins. Hildegard’s passionate and dramatic sense of self as an uneducated, feeble woman, a mere “feather on the breath of God” chosen for her virginal purity as a vessel for His divine vision - fitted her admirably for the role.

Hildegard built a state of the art apothecary, herbary, and hospital; wrote two books of healing; was known to use sympathetic magic; was reported to cast out a demon on one occasion; healed the sick, and was called upon to interpret ritual objects and magical artifacts by clergy. A century or so later she would have been called a witch and a heretic. It is fortunate for us that she was not, and her art and writings survived to influence generations of later alchemists, mystics, artists, and musicians. She was considered a seed of the European Renaissance, certainly of the German Renaissance that preceded the Italian,
 and her work influenced centuries of alchemists and theologians.

A true synthetist,
 Hildegard used all wisdom and knowledge available to her to create her unique holistic cosmology. She integrated neo-Platonic philosophy and Classic Greek, Roman, and Islamic medicine and healing lore, the Islamic being newly
 translated into Latin in her lifetime; Christian theology; and traditional
 folk lore, creating a Vision of the Cosmos incredibly compelling to the people of her time. But ultimately, her Vision
 transcended all of her influences, tapping into deep archetypal ideas of
 the unity of Creation and humanity's opportunity to participate in the harmony of Creation, especially through music.

Born in the crossroads of the Europe, the Rhinelands, Hildegard was also born, in a sense, at a crossroads in time. The transformation of music from the florid, microtonally nuanced singing common across Europe and the Mideast to the discrete notes and fixed modes of the later Church was yet to be complete. Even in her lifetime, in her own compositions, many of where were written to fill out the music to be sung for weeks of the Cistercian holy year, the movement towards this standardization is evident. (It is believed by some that the compositions served draw her abbeys closer to the Cistercian order of her beloved spiritual patron, Bernard of Clairveaux). Monophonic (single melody) musical writing was common. The emerging polyphony (multivoice) singing that Hildegard likely practiced and which reached its fullest flowering in the renaissance to come, was not yet notated.

While she pushed the boundaries of church authority on more than one occasion, and even earned her convent an interdict in the last year of her life for her unwillingness to disinter the body of a nobleman crusader who it was believed had died excommunicate (it was lifted before her death), she is widely regarded as a saint, although never formerly canonized. Today, Saint Hildegard enjoys a renascence of interest in her distinctive and passionate compositions, with their soaring leaps of fourths and fifths and imagery of a woman’s ability to connect with spirit. In doing so, to add her measure to the harmony of the Cosmos itself.