A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

172 leigh-choate, flynn, and fassler
in the last vision of Scivias (3.13), fijinished by 1151. Several intermediate
series of song texts (excluding the Scivias songs) were redacted as letters
addressed to the Rupertsberg community (see especially Letters 192 and
390); however, these are of dubious epistolary character. More likely, they
contain material delivered in chapter meetings or at the evening meal,
when Hildegard often would have taught, especially on feast days. Thus,
the diffferent series of songs may have been compiled from individual
leaves or small booklets prepared for specifijic occasions; these were then
organized into the various intermediate collections, some of which were
subsequently gathered into what Newman calls the “liturgical miscellany”
of homiletic, visionary, and (30) lyric texts.39 With three texts dedicated
to St Rupert and many to the Virgin, both patrons of Hildegard’s convent
on the Rupertsberg, this repertory may extend to the early 1150s, before
individual songs and groups of songs were collected into the miscellany,
perhaps in the mid to late 1150s. The miscellany may indeed be associated
with the “symphonia harmonie celestium reuelationum” mentioned at the
beginning of Hildegard’s Liber vite meritorum (c.1158).
Hildegard’s fijinal years (c.1174–1179) seem to have seen another concerted
efffort to collect and organize her songs, with particular attention paid to
fijixing the melodies in pitch-secure notation and classifying them according
to liturgical function and genre. The Scivias songs, the long version of
the Ordo, and all but four songs in the miscellany are included in notated
collections. At present, four 12th-century sources preserving one or more
notated songs are known, and the musical sections of two of them have
appeared in facsimile editions. The manuscripts are as follows:
Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Theol. Phil. 4° 253:
Compiled c.1154–1170 with scribal hands identifijied from Zwiefalten, Disibodenberg,
and Rupertsberg. Folios 27r–59v and 75r–93v contain 135 letters
from Hildegard’s correspondence, including 13 song texts, two on fol.
28r and 11 on fols 53v–55r. Folio 42v contains a notated version of the
responsory O vos imitatores. The compilation date suggests that this is
Hildegard’s earliest surviving notated song; however, the leaf containing
it served as the unbound cover sheet of a gathering, so it could have been
copied into the manuscript later, when notated versions of Hildegard’s
music became available.
39 Newman, Introduction to Symph., p. 340, following Lieven Van Acker, “Der Briefwechsel
der heiligen Hildegard von Bingen. Vorbemerkungen zu einer kritischen Edition,”
Revue Bénédictine 98 (1988): 141–68; 99 (1989): 118–54.