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hyperion
Hyperion A 66039 (LP) · 1982
Hyperion CDA 66039 (CD) · 1986
01 - Columba Aspexit, sequence for St Maximinus [5:16]
4 sopranos, symphony
02 - Ave, Generosa, hymn [4:37]
Margaret Philpot
03 - O Ignis Spiritus, sequence [4:49]
3 tenors
04 - O Ierusalem, sequence to St Rupert [8:05]
4 sopranos, symphony, reed drones
05 - O Euchari, response for St Eucharius [5:44]
Emily van Evera
06 - O Viridissima Virga, antiphon [3:15]
3 tenors, symphony
07 - O Presul Vere Civitas, sequence for St Disibod [6:16]
Margaret Philpot
08 - O Ecclesia, sequence for Saint Ursula & her Companions [6:00]
3 sopranos, symphony
Gothic Voices
Christopher Page
Emma Kirkby, soprano - #1 4
Emily van Evera, soprano - #1 4 5 8
Poppy Holden, soprano - #1 4 8
Juditht Stell, soprano - #1 4 8
Margaret Philpot, contralto - #2 7
Andrew Parrott, tenor - #3 6
Kevin Breen, tenor - #3 6
Howard Milner, tenor - #3 6
with
Doreen Muskett, symphony - #1 4 6 8
Robert White, reed drones - #4
Recorded on September 1981,
St Jude-on-the-Hill, Hampstead Garden Suburb, London, United Kingdom
Produced by Martin Compton
Engineered by Tony Faulkner
Reeditado en la serie Gramophone Awards Winner Collection
en una caja:
junto con The Service of Venus and Mars & A song for Francesca
"Listen: there was once a king sitting on his throne. Around him stood
great and wonderfully beautiful columns ornamented with ivory, bearing the banners of the
king with great honour. Then it pleased the king to raise a small feather from the ground and
he commanded it to fly. The feather flew, not because of anything in itself but because the air
bore it along.
Thus am I ‘A feather on the breath of God’."
That is how one of the most remarkable creative personalities of the
Middle Ages describes herself. Hildegard of Bingen was born to noble
parents in the small village of Bemersheim, near Alzey, Rheinhessen
(now in West Germany), in the year 1098. In her eighth year she was put
into the care of Jutta of Spanheim, the abbess of a small community of
nuns attached to the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg, near
Bingen, about twenty-five miles south-west of Mainz. So began a life in
which she was destined to become the most celebrated woman of her age
as a visionary, naturalist, playwright, poetess and composer. In 1141,
having succeeded Jutta as abbess, she saw tongues of flame descend from
the heavens and settle upon her. Thereafter she devoted herself to a
life of intense and passionate creativity. Among her literary works she
produced two books on natural history and medicine (Physica and Cause
et cure) and a morality play, the Ordo Virtutum, which
pre-dates all other works in that genre by some hundred years. Her book
of visions, Scivias, occupied her for ten years between
1141 and 1151.
This recording draws upon Hildegard’s large collection of music
and poetry, the Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum
– ‘The Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial
Revelations’– which she continued to enlarge and enrich
throughout her life. It contains some of the finest songs ever written
in the Middle Ages, and a number of the most elaborate, the Sequences,
are recorded here for the first time. They are so profoundly motivated
by Hildegard’s devotional life that it is hard to tell whether
she is exploring music and poetry through spirituality or vice versa.
The songs are conceived on a large – sometimes a massive –
scale; it is in superabundance that Hildegard found herself both as
poetess and composer. Profligacy of imagination relieved the intensity
of her impressions whilst validating her as a visionary in the eyes of
her contemporaries. The corresponding musical resources are immense,
ranging from the most tranquil melody to an almost obsessive
declamation at high pitch. Everywhere we sense a movement of the mind
in music. This is the work of deeply engaged artistry: in
Hildegard’s words, of ‘writing, seeing, hearing and knowing
all in one manner’.
Hildegard’s fame was not confined to Germany. She was also
involved in politics and diplomacy; her friendship and advice were
sought by popes, emperors, kings, archbishops, abbots and abbesses with
whom she corresponded voluminously. The ‘Sybil of the
Rhine’, as she was known, died at the monastery she had refounded
on the Rupertsberg on 17 September in the year 1179. The following
century Popes Gregory IX and Innocent IV proposed her canonization,
followed later by Clement V and John XXII. This, however, never came to
pass.
"With a great desire I have desired to come to you and rest with you in
the marriage of Heaven,
running to you by a new path as the clouds course in the purest air
like sapphire".
A note on performance
Medieval Latin has no exact equivalent of the verb ‘to
perform’; it is a language which does not precisely identify the
self-conscious and extrovert activity that we associate with
‘performing’.
This is suggestive in a number of ways and, as far as the music of
Hildegard is concerned, it is easy to understand. Consider the habits
of medieval monastic readers: the more spiritual meaning a text was
thought to embody, the more they internalized it by a process which
they frequently compared to digestion, absorbing the words in
tranquillity, then ruminating upon them to release the nourishing
spiritual senses.
Plainchant was often approached in a similar frame of mind. Ideally,
singers were to allow their activity to absorb the whole spirit and
body, inducing a state of meditative calm and so intensifying the
quality of devotional life. Distractions, such as the intrusion of
instrumental decorations or of extrovert vocal practices, were
therefore to be avoided. Discretion was the basis of the ideal: voices
betraying a poised, attentive spirit dwelling upon the inner meaning of
the text, sensitive to musical nuances but never seduced by them.
This is what the performances on this record try to recapture. It is
not the only way of performing medieval plainchant, but it can at least
be aligned with virtually every medieval attempt to describe performing
ideals. We believe, also, that such an approach is faithful to
Hildegard’s creative personality. A Romantic notion of her as an
intensely individual artist striving to establish a new poetic and
musical language could easily encourage a do-as-you-please approach to
performance, complete with instruments and wayward vocal techniques.
But this would be a falsified picture. Hildegard’s writing
suggests a quiet mastery that controls ecstasy and shuns delirium,
always working within the mainstream of Christian tradition.
Columba aspexit — Sequentia de Sancto Maximino
sung by Emma Kirkby, Emily van Evera, Poppy Holden, Judith Stell, with
Doreen Muskett (symphony)
Columba aspexit presents a vision of Saint Maximinus as a
celebrant at Mass. The imagery and general conception owe much to
Ecclesiasticus 50: 1–26 (not in the Authorized Version), a
celebration of the High Priest, Simon. The Holy Ghost hovers
(symbolized by the dove and the lattice. Hildegard explains the latter
symbol in the Scivias as the window of Christ’s mercy
through which shines the perfect revelation of the New Testament) as
Maximinus celebrates; flooded with grace he is a building — Saint
Paul’s edifice of the temple which is in the devout heart.
God’s love, represented in biblical fashion by the heat of the
sun, blazes in the dark sanctuary. The ‘stone’ (lapide)
of stanza 4 is the altar — these lines are rich in imagery drawn
from the liturgy for consecrating and anointing an altar; as he moves
to it in his celebration, Maximinus is like the hart of Psalm 41 (42 in
the Authorized Version). Stanza 5 turns to the clergy who surround
Maximinus in the ceremony. The ‘perfume-makers’ (perfume is
a metaphor of Divine Grace) are the clerics of Trier: Maximinus was the
patron of the Benedictine abbey there and Hildegard probably wrote this
sequence for them. The ‘holy sacrifice with the rams’ was
required by God in the ordination of Aaron’s sons to the
priesthood (Exodus 29), but the ‘rams’ may also be the
choirboys at Trier (Scivias, 2:5:45). Hildegard ends with a
eulogy of Maximinus as celebrant, ‘strong and beautiful in rites
and in the shining of the altar’.
Ave, generosa — Ymnus de Sancta Maria
sung by Margaret Philpot
Ave, generosa is a testimony to Hildegard’s devotion to
the Virgin. The imagery is frequently erotic.
O ignis spiritus — Sequentia de spiritu sancto
sung by Andrew Parrot, Kevin Breen, Howard Milner
O ignis spiritus is Hildegard’s apostrophe to her Muse,
the Pentecostal fire which settled upon her and imparted knowledge of
the major biblical books.
O Ierusalem — De Sancto Ruperto
sung by Emma Kirkby, Emily van Evera, Poppy Holden, Judith Stell, with
Doreen Muskett (symphony) and Robert White (reed drones)
O Ierusalem celebrates Saint Rupert. Hildegard re-founded his
monastery in 1150 and moved there with her nuns. The original buildings
were destroyed by the Normans (the ‘fools’ of the
Sequence), providing Hildegard with a potent but implicit comparison
between her monastery and Jerusalem, destroyed on Earth and rebuilt in
Heaven (Revelations 21, whence some of the imagery of this Sequence is
derived). The ‘living stones’ (‘vivis
lapidibus’) have been taken from the hymn Urbs beata
Ierusalem for the dedication of a church (but compare 1 Peter 2:
4–5). Perhaps Hildegard composed this Sequence for the dedication
ceremony, or for its commemoration. In this case the ‘ostensio’
of stanza 6 may be an ostension, or ‘showing’, of the
relics of Saint Rupert during the ceremony.
O Euchari — De sancto Euchario Sequentia
sung Emily van Evera
O Euchari5, like Columba aspexit, was almost certainly
written for the clergy at Trier. Saint Eucharius was a third-century
missionary who became the bishop of the city. Stanza 1 evokes his years
as an itinerant preacher (during which he performed miracles). The
‘fellow-travellers’ of stanza 2 are presumably Valerius and
Maternus, his companions in the missionary work. The ‘three
shrines’ of stanza 5 (compare Matthew 17: 4) represent the
Trinity and perhaps, if we follow the Glossa Ordinaria, the
triple piety of words, thoughts and deeds. The ‘old and the new
wine’ of stanza 6 represent the Testaments: Ecclesia savours
both, but the Synagogue, like the ‘old bottles’ of
Christ’s parable, cannot sustain the New. Hildegard closes the
Sequence with a prayer that the people of Trier may never revert to the
paganism in which Eucharius found them, but may always re-enact the
redemptive sacrifice of Christ in the form of the Mass.
O viridissima virga — De Sancta Maria
sung by Andrew Parrot, Kevin Breen, Howard Milner, with Doreen Muskett
(symphony)
With superb control Hildegard in O viridissima virga elaborates
the image of Mary as the branch of Jesse. Mary’s fertility endows
the animal and vegetable kingdoms with new life and brings mankind to
God through the sheer joy of contemplating the Divine agency.
O presul vere civitatis — Sequentia de sancto Dysibodo
sung by Margaret Philpot
O presul vere civitatis celebrates Saint Disibod, the patron of
the monastery where Hildegard was raised. She composed this sequence in
response to Abbot Cuno of Disibodenberg who wrote to her asking for a
copy of anything ‘that God reveals to you about our
patron’. She certainly sent him this poem; we do not know whether
it was accompanied by the music. Hildegard evokes the itinerant
hermit’s life that brought Disibod to the place later to be the
site of the monastery, and emphasizes his founder’s role through
a stream of architectural, cloistral imagery. The
‘finial-stone’ which introduces this imagery is, of course,
Christ (see, for example, Matthew 21: 42).
O Ecclesia — De Undecim Milibus Virginibus
sung by Emma Kirkby, Emily van Evera, Poppy Holden, Judith Stell, with
Doreen Muskett (symphony)
O Ecclesia celebrates Saint Ursula who, according to legend, was
martyred with eleven thousand virgins at Cologne. Ursula, a woman who
had rejected an earthly marriage for a heavenly one, who had died in
Cologne, and who led a company of Christian women, naturally occupied a
special place in Hildegard’s devotion. There were relics of
Ursula at Disibodenberg where Hildegard had been raised, and Elisabeth
of Schonau (a mystic whom Hildegard knew) created a stir in 1156/7 with
her visions of Ursula and her companions. Hildegard does not appear to
have been directly influenced by these visions, but this is her most
sustained response to a legend that was clearly popular and much in the
minds of clerics and laymen.
Christopher Page
The music and texts are from Wiesbaden, Hessische Landesbibliothek M52,
edited by Dr Christopher Page. This manuscript has the advantage over
the (possibly somewhat earlier) Dendermonde manuscript of being
available to listeners in facsimile (ed. J Gmelch, Düsseldorf,
1913). The editions performed here are strictly based upon this source.
Variation of ‘u’ and ‘v’ has been normalized.
Thanks are due to Régine Page, Patricia Morison (All Souls
College, Oxford), Ronald Woodley (Christ Church College), and Peter
Godman (Pembroke College) for their comments and advice, though they
cannot be held responsible for the final versions printed here.
The front illustration is taken from Hildegard’s book of visions,
Scivias (Part 2, Vision 1), and shows her vision of the Creation, the
Fall, and the Advent of Christ. Hildegard sees God as a circle of flame
‘burning fiercely in a gentle wind’. The flame touches a
muddy patch of earth and created things appear (shown in the lower
roundel). A man is created: a white flower springs up and the man
smells it but does not taste its sweet odour. He falls into darkness
(the second figure). Gradually stars begin to appear who are the
prophets of the Old Testament, and, eventually, Christ is born (the
lowest figure in the picture). These illustrations are reproduced by
kind permission of Otto Müller Verlages, Salzburg.