{"id":2142310,"date":"2025-11-08T04:39:06","date_gmt":"2025-11-08T04:39:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2142310"},"modified":"2025-11-08T04:39:06","modified_gmt":"2025-11-08T04:39:06","slug":"hildegard-von-bingen-was-a-saint-an-abbess-a-mystic-a-pioneering-composer-and-is-now-an-opera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/hildegard-von-bingen-was-a-saint-an-abbess-a-mystic-a-pioneering-composer-and-is-now-an-opera\/","title":{"rendered":"Hildegard von Bingen was a saint, an abbess, a mystic, a pioneering composer and is now an opera"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Opera has housed a long and curious fetish for the convent. Around a century ago, composers couldn\u2019t get enough of lustful, visionary nuns. Although relatively tame next to what was to follow, Puccini\u2019s 1918 \u201cSuor Angelica\u201d revealed a convent where worldly and spiritual desires collide.<\/p>\n

But Hindemith\u2019s \u201cSancta Susanna,\u201d with its startling love affair between a nun and her maid servant, titillated German audiences at the start of the roaring twenties, and still can. A sexually and violently explicit production in Stuttgart last year led to 18 freaked-out audience members<\/a> requiring medical attention \u2014 and sold-out houses.<\/p>\n

Los Angeles Opera got in the act early on. A daring production of Prokofiev\u2019s 1927 \u201cThe Fiery Angel,\u201d one of the operas that opened the company\u2019s second season in 1967, saw, wrote Times music critic Martin Bernheimer<\/a>, \u201chysterical nuns tear off their sacred habits as they writhe climactically in topless demonic frenzy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now we have, as a counterbalance to a lurid male gaze as the season\u2019s new opera for L.A. Opera\u2019s 40th anniversary season, Sarah Kirkland Snider\u2019s sincere and compelling \u201cHildegard,\u201d based on a real-life 12th century abbess and present-day cult figure, St. Hildegard von Bingen. The opera, which had its premiere at the Wallis on Wednesday night, is the latest in L.A. Opera’s ongoing collaboration with Beth Morrison Projects, which commissioned the work.<\/p>\n

Elkhanah Pulitzer\u2019s production is decorous and spare. Snider’s slow, elegantly understated and, within bounds, reverential opera operates as much as a passion play as an opera. Its concerns and desires are our 21st century concerns and desires, with Hildegard beheld as a proto-feminist icon. Its characters and music so easily traverse a millennium\u2019s distance that the High Middle Ages might be the day before yesterday.<\/p>\n

Hildegard is best known for the music she produced in her Rhineland German monastery and for the transcriptions of her luminous visions. But she has also attracted a cult-like following as healer with an extensive knowledge of herbal remedies some still apply as alternative medicine to this day, as she has for her remarkable success challenging the patriarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.<\/p>\n

She has further reached broad audiences through Oliver Sacks\u2019 book, \u201cMigraine,\u201d in which the widely read neurologist proposed that Hildegard\u2019s visions were a result of her headaches. Those visions, themselves, have attained classic status. Recordings of her music are plentiful. \u201cLux Vivens,\u201d produced by David Lynch and featuring Scottish fiddle player Jocelyn Montgomery, must be the first to put a saint\u2019s songs on the popular culture map.<\/p>\n

Margarethe von Trotta made an effective biopic of Hildegard, staring the intense singer Barbara Sukowa. An essential biography, \u201cThe Woman of Her Age\u201d by Fiona Maddocks, followed Hildegard\u2019s canonization by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012.<\/p>\n

Snider, who also wrote the libretto, focuses her two-and-a-half-hour opera, however, on but a crucial year in Hildegard\u2019s long life (she is thought to have lived to 82 or 83). A mother superior in her 40s, she has found a young acolyte, Richardis, deeply devoted to her and who paints representations of Hildegard\u2019s visions. Those visions, as unheard-of divine communion with a woman, draw her into conflict with priests who find them false. But she goes over the head of her adversarial abbot, Cuno, and convinces the Pope that her visions are the voice of God.<\/p>\n

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