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EARLY MUSIC REVIEW
Hildegard von Bingen & "Sequentia" Vanquish Time
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By Heather Hadlock
Once in a while, if you are lucky, you get to see a production of an
esoteric musical work that makes sense of it on its own terms and on ours.
Sequentia's interpretation of Hildegard von Bingen's musical drama "Ordo
Virtutum," presented in Stanford's Memorial Church last Friday, charges this ancient, enigmatic piece with meaning and vitality.
"Ordo Virtutum" is preserved in the 12th-century Rupertsberger Codex,
together with Hildegard's illuminations, poems, and almost 80 sacred songs.
While little is known about its composition or performance during
Hildegard's lifetime, scholars assume that she wrote it for her nuns at
Rupertsberg. The "Ordo" may even have been performed in conjunction with the
dedication of that convent in 1152. As Sequentia presents it, the drama
works on at least two levels: as an allegory about the human quest for
salvation, and as a coded manifesto for women's religious vocation.
The action is simple: a Soul seeks and ultimately joins a community of
beautiful, powerful, and mutually supportive female figures, the Virtues.
The Virtues encourage the Soul to overcome her weakness and ambivalence and
join them, but when the Devil intervenes, the faltering Soul follows him
instead. In the second scene, the individual Virtues introduce themselves
and mutually admire each other. After an interval, the exhausted and
broken Soul returns, asking the Virtues to receive her again. They do, and
in the fourth and final scene the powers of Humility, Victory, and Chastity
vanquish the Devil.
Ordo summarizes Hildegard's ideas about sacred virginity as the most
perfect condition. Her logic contains some surprises: for example, "Fear
of God" does not keep the Soul away from God but rather "can prepare you...
to gaze upon the living God and not die of it." The governing oxymoron is
that "Queen Humility" wears a royal crown and directs the community. Even
the apparently passive virtues of Obedience, Fear of God, and Humility are
powerful in their serenity and forthright speech.
The second scene, in which the Virtues eternally celebrate each other in a series of solos and choral responses, suggests a utopian convent where each member knows her own strength and each one's contribution is valued and praised. Sequentia conveyed this balance of the individual and the collective through timbre. In their solos, each singer revealed the grain of her unique voice, while their choral responses and hymns created a richly homogeneous sound.
The program book included the full Latin-English text, impossible to follow
in the dark, but that was good: reading would have destroyed the ritual
effect. Even an intermission would have broken the spell. Thanks to the
beautiful rhetoric of Hildegard's writing, her expressive exploration of the
high and low ranges around a melodic center of gravity, one could follow
while understanding only a few words.
The shapes of phrases and sentences also emerged through the performers' supple declamation. Their rhythmically free style consistently emphasized the exultant ascending arpeggios and melismas. (They tended to sing
descending melismas quickly and lightly, like ornaments.) The monophonic
context invested register, timbre, and volume with surprising dramatic
power. I found myself studying and savoring Hildegard's poetry after the
performance, my reading enhanced by the memory of individual faces, bodies,
colors, voices, and presences now attached to each abstract name.
Director Franz-Josef Heumannskämper's minimalist staging conveyed the
quasi-ritual action well. The singers, arranged in tableaux, stood in a loose half-circle to sing to each other, and closed ranks to
encourage the broken Soul in her "pilgrimage" up and down the
central aisle. The Virtues wore miter-like headdresses of royal blue,
perhaps modeled on headdresses worn by Hildegard and her nuns. Their
uniform white robes were open to reveal colored tunics representing their
individual attributes: scarlet for Victory, hyacinth-blue for Charity, pink
for Chastity. Gestures were minimal but eloquent.The only set was the
dark, gilded space of Memorial Church itself, whose rounded ceilings, wings, and galleries have never seemed more appropriately feminine. Hildegard, whose imagination reveled in colors, jewels, and intricate design, would have
approved.
These performances of "Ordo Virtutum" were dedicated to the memory of
Sequentia's co-founder Barbara Thornton, "guiding light of this production"
and of their recorded cycle of Hildegard's works. Barbara Thornton, 48, died
suddenly on November 8, 1998.
(Heather Hadlock is Assistant Professor of Music History at Stanford University.)
©1998 Heather Hadlock, all rights reserved
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