Take a look at our current subscription offers.
Hildegard of Bingen
1098 - 1179
During the summer of 1997 in the nightclubs on the island of Ibiza, there was one track in particular that made the heaving dancefloors go wild: 'The Swinging Nun'.
Life and Music
- During her life she was a leading light of the medieval intelligentsia and one of the most influential women in Europe.
- Thereafter she fell into 800 years of relative obscurity, her name familiar only to the most intrepid of academic archive-surfers.
- Hildegard was a complex creative personality, sometimes described as a Renaissance woman before the Renaissance.
- She was the author of several visionary books, works of natural history and medicine.
- In the States, it's her theology and mysticism that have won her most friends, with radical priests like Matthew Fox championing her as a leader of 'Creation Spirituality'.
- She wrote rambling religious poems in Latin and painted pictures of herself, most famously as a tiny seated figure gazing upwards at a circular design perhaps intended to symbolise the cosmos but looking remarkably like a Tibetan mandala.
- Her poems and devotional texts were often set to music, to be sung by the choir of her convent.
- Hildegard is the first composer whose biographical details we have any clear idea about that she is still best known in Britain.
- Even in her lifetime Hildegard was seen to be breaking new musical ground. "It is said that you are raised to Heaven, that much is revealed to you, and that you bring forth great writings, and discover new manners of song," wrote Master Odo of Paris in a letter to Hildegard in 1148.
- Musically speaking, her achievement lies in a refinement and enrichment of Gregorian chant.
- She gave conventional plainsong a new flexibility and expressiveness, creating long, spiralling melismas that make the music of the monks of Santo Domingo de Silos seem curiously flatfooted and earthbound in comparison.
- For a first taste of Hildegard's genius the 13-year-old Gothic Voices CD A Feather on the Breath of God, featuring the perennially crystalline voice of Emma Kirkby and a group of equally fine female singers is the music which started all the fuss.
- A Feather on the Breath of God, released in 1981, has sold a remarkable 260,000 copies, making it the eleventh biggest-selling classical CD of all time.
- The vast, overarching opus in which Hildegard included her 77 songs and one music drama she entitled Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum - 'the Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations'.
- In the early Eighties, with the early-music movement in full swing, her name began to be heard again in the company of Guillaume de Machaut, Perotin, Josquin Desprez and other masters of the pre-Renaissance era.
- No rediscovery of the Eighties and Nineties has seemed so unlikely as that of the 12th-century mystic, composer, poet, philosopher, healer and teacher Hildegard of Bingen - otherwise known by nightclubbers as 'the Swinging Nun'.
Did you know?
In Germany, Hildegard-mania has tended to focus on her avant-garde contribution to holistic medicine and nutrition. In health shops all over the country you can buy 'Hildegard bread' and naturopathic Hildegard face creams and moisturisers made from a primitive grain called Dinkel.
