A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

166 leigh-choate, flynn, and fassler
the text of the Ordo in his Nine Medieval Latin Plays, and he produced a
critical edition taking into account the text of Trithemius’s copy.12
The two major music manuscripts that survive were both produced
at the Rupertsberg in Hildegard’s lifetime, and both are available in
facsimile editions. Symphonia harmoniae caelestium revelationum: Dendermonde
contains a brief introduction to Dendermonde and its music
by Peter van Poucke.13 Crucial further information about the music fascicle
is found in Newman’s introduction in Opera minora and in Angela
Carlevaris’s introduction to Liber vite meritorum. Dendermonde surely predates
1176, when the Cistercian monks of Villers thanked Hildegard for it.14
It contains the earliest neumed collection of Hildegard’s songs, possibly prepared
under the supervision of Hildegard’s secretary, Volmar (d. 1173).15 The
facsimile edition of the two music fascicles of the Riesenkodex, Hildegard
von Bingen, Lieder. Faksimile Riesencodex, offfers notes and commentary by
Michael Klaper in both English and German.16 The volume also includes
full transcriptions of Hildegard’s sequence for St Rupert, O Ierusalem,
and the responsory O vos imitatores, which survives in three neumed
versions.17 The music fascicles of the Riesenkodex are independent and
may have been added when the manuscript was compiled. Some scholars
believe that the scribe who copied a few pages of Scivias (fols 46–48) also
copied the song and drama texts, and, some speculate, also the neumes.
The introductory discussions of neumes and scribal hands in the two
facsimiles are useful for learning to sing and transcribe both text and music
from the sources. Codicological and paleographical observations can be
placed in the context of earlier studies of the Rupertsberg scriptorium,
12 Peter Dronke, Nine Medieval Latin Plays (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 147–84, with notes
and introduction. The critical edition is Ordo.
13 Peter van Poucke, ed., Hildegard of Bingen: Symphonia harmoniae caelestium revelationum:
Dendermonde St.-Pieters & Paulusabdij Ms. Cod. 9 (Peer, 1991).
14 Epistolarium I, 107, p. 268. See Guiberti Gemblacensis Epistolae quae in codice
B. R. BRUX. 5527–5534 inueniuntur I, ed. by A. Derolez, CCCM 66 (Turnhout, 1988), Letter 21,
pp. 245–47.
15 Newman, Introduction to Symph., p. 338.
16 Hildegard von Bingen, Lieder. Faksimile Riesencodex [Hs. 2] der Hessischen Landesbibliothek
Wiesbaden, fol. 466–481v, ed. Lorenz Welker, trans. Lori Kruckenberg (Wiesbaden,
1998).
17 In Dendermonde, the Riesenkodex, and Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek,
Theol. Phil. 4° 253, a compendium of various materials, with scribes from the Disibodenberg,
the Rupertsberg, and Wiesbaden.