Onward and Upward With the Arts - The First Composer

The cosmic musical visions of Hildegard of Bingen.

- By Alex Ross

Disibodenberg, a nine-hundred-year-old Benedictine monastery in the Rhineland region of western Germany, is a majestically dismal ruin, its roofless buildings overrun by ivy and interspersed with stands of oak, ash, and beech. When I searched out the site, last May, I was the only visitor. I half expected to come across Caspar David Friedrich painting at an easel. One sector, consisting of scattered blocks and fragments of walls, is marked with a sign, in German: "Area of the Hildegard Convent (12th Cent.)." This, according to one guess, is where the nun, theologian, poet, and composer Hildegard of Bingen spent about forty years of her eight-decade life. In her teens, she was enclosed with two other nuns at the monastery, seemingly destined for a life of anonymous devotion. Something of the ambience of the place seeps into Hildegard's hymn to St. Disibod, the Irish bishop for whom the monastery is named: "You hid yourself out of sight/drunk with the smell of flowers in the windows of the saints/reaching towards God." Hildegard did not stay out of sight.