A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

186 leigh-choate, flynn, and fassler
customary jewels and costumes as well.73 Her powerful dramatic sense
animated not only the Ordo, but also her treatises, letters, and sermons, as
well as the rich liturgical life she apparently developed for her nuns. Her
ceremony for the exorcising of a demon is a miniature drama relating to
the Ordo in a number of ways.74
Musical analysis of the drama has often focused on Hildegard’s use of
modes (or scales) in establishing scenes, characters, and conflict. Audrey
Davidson pointed to musical scenes as defijined by mode.75 In an unpublished
paper, “Music as Drama: The Musical Language of Hildegard’s Ordo
Virtutum” (1998), Susan Rankin worked more closely with mode and melody
type, and her study, generously shared, has influenced the analyses
of Stefan Morent and Roswitha Dabke.76 Morent provides a table identifying
the modes speech by speech; clearly, the Ordo moves in a type of
modal progression, with large blocks of texts set to material in one mode,
or in particular modes in alternation, with fluctuation between D and E
throughout.77 Morent also notes the importance of melody types in linking
the speeches of various fijigures and developing plot. It must be added
that Hildegard uses music graphically, so that its very motion embodies
character and themes, and that she sometimes brings in well-established
liturgical melodies to reinforce the action.
The opening of the music drama reveals many of these strategies.
Instead of a row of prophets proclaiming Christ’s advent, Hildegard’s
Virtues are a cadre of angelic warrior women fijighting for the salvation
of souls. The opening scenes witness the passing of the baton from one
group of characters and type of drama to new ones. Hildegard begins the
Ordo in D, and the Patriarchs and Prophets sing in the low (plagal) scale
of the two centered on D. The Virtues respond in D but soon leap upward
to the higher (authentic) range. There they begin a series of notes that
tumble to the lower realm of their Old Testament archetypes, who reply
in this low register that they are the roots (sumus radices), while the
73 Epistolarium, I, 52R, pp. 126–30; Letters, I, 52R, pp. 128–30.
74 The ceremony is found in Hildegard’s correspondence with Abbot Gedolphus
of Brauweiler, edited in V. Hild., pp. 58–63, and translated in Letters, I, 68R, pp. 148–51.
See also Peter Dronke, “Problemata Hildegardiana,” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 16 (1981):
97–131, esp. 118–22.
75 Audrey Ekdahl Davidson, “Music and Performance: Hildegard of Bingen’s Ordo
Virtutum,” in The Ordo Virtutum of Hildegard of Bingen, ed. Audrey Ekdahl Davidson,
pp. 1–29.
76 Morent, “Ordo virtutum. Vom Spiel der Kräfte”; and Roswitha Dabke, “The Hidden
Scheme of the Virtues in Hildegard of Bingen’s Ordo Virtutum,” Parergon 23 (2006): 11–46.
77 Morent, “Ordo virtutum. Vom Spiel der Kräfte,” pp. 241–43.