A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

hearing the heavenly symphony 191
indeed Heavenly Desire, she embodies the reversal from longing for the
world to longing for Heaven, and thus is pivotal in Anima’s process of
change. The Devil chafes against reversal: “You were in my embrace, I led
you out. Yet now you are going back.”88
Musically, too, this explanation of the Ordo and the identifijication of
Heavenly Desire make sense, adding to Fassler’s understanding of the
drama as a sonic Tree of Jesse.89 The musical ranges of the characters
take on special importance, as Morent has demonstrated;90 if the Ordo
is a tree, the higher the branches, the nearer to the lofty peaks where
the Virgin Mary and her Son have their allegorical dwelling. The Virtues’
response to Heavenly Desire includes the fijirst high point of the second
octad of Virtues. Heavenly Desire appears hand in hand with Contempt of
the World (Contemptus mundi), who leads the Beatitude Virtues in their
representation of salvation to post-Incarnation souls. The table above
demonstrates that, in general, the music moves higher as we ascend the
tree of Virtues. The highest range belongs to Mercy (Misericordia), whose
melody, mode, and range foreshadow the play’s most triumphant song,
that of Victory (Victoria), when the Devil is bound and the Virtues celebrate
his demise and Anima’s restoration. Here Victory sings (stretching
up to aa), “Rejoice, O friends, for the ancient serpent is bound!”91 Her
melody presents one of Hildegard’s most dramatic borrowings: it derives
from the famous Marian antiphon Ave regina caelorum, thus connecting
the Virtues’ actions to the Incarnation and the Virgin Mary, who is the
Mother of Mercy.92 The Virtues who bind the Devil are also allied with
Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins, whose actions, like those of the Virtues and
Mary, are the pearls that choke Satan.93
88 Dronke, “Ordo Virtutum,” in Nine Medieval Latin Plays, p. 177, ll. 209–10; Ordo,
p. 518, ll. 286–87: “Tu amplexata es me, et ego foras eduxi te. Sed nunc in reversione tua
confundis me.”
89 See especially Fassler, “Melodious Singing.” These issues are investigated in Margot
Fassler, “‘Who are These Like Clouds?’: Hildegard’s Ordo Virtutum in the Context of Scivias,”
Journal of the American Musicological Society 67 (2014), forthcoming.
90 Morent, “Ordo virtutum. Vom Spiel der Kräfte,” pp. 227–51.
91 Dronke, Nine Medieval Latin Plays, pp. 178–79, l. 227; Ordo, p. 519, l. 311: “Gaudete, o
socii, quia antiquus serpens / ligatus est!”
92 Fassler, “Melodious Singing,” pp. 171–72.
93 See the next chapter in this volume, “Hildegard as Musical Hagiographer.”