De Angelis

is the source of all experience. The fall and redemption of Lucifer is like the
parable of the Prodigal Son, whose banishment is self-imposed and whose
redemption is self-motivated.
Back to De Angelis, at the point where the text speaks of the fallen angel,
my music departs for the first time from the pervasive phrygian mode (on E)
of Hildegard’s antiphon. It begins to travel to different tonal regions and the
stylistic references span the entire era of the Renaissance paradigm: modal
becomes tonal and increasingly chromatic. The transition is scored for the
mezzo-soprano soloist and the choir and this gives an opportunity to the
three contraltos to slowly move to the front of the church and place themselves
behind the soloist and in front of the choir. Along with this relocation
from back to front, the music of the three contraltos undergoes significant
transformation: Their distant echoes and fragments of Hildegard’s music
which up until this point reached the audience indirectly (from the back
and through ambience) have given way to full-fledged singing of original
music which attempts to interpret Hildegard’s text and—for a time—manages
to steal the spotlight away from the soloist. The allegory is clear: the
mezzo-soprano stands for Hildegard herself and sings mostly Hildegard’s
music throughout the work; the choir is the congregation of the faithful
who respond to Hildegard’s music. Finally the three contraltos are a female
trinity which before the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance
remains in a nascent state: unconscious, addressing the spirit, but not yet the
intellect (symbolized by the contraltos’ placement at the back of the church).
With the emergence of the Renaissance paradigm, the feminine element
gradually emerges into consciousness (symbolized by the contraltos’ procession
to the front) and eventually becomes fully empowered in our days, at
the end of the first Christian aeon. In De Angelis, this female trinity takes
center stage at this point and plays a leading role until the end of the work.
At the very end the reestablishment of Lucifer among God’s angels is aluded
to by the choir’s repeated statements of the word ‘instituit’ while the mezzo-soprano
and the three contraltos repeat the opening lines of adoration
for the angels, but this time as an adoration for Lucifer, the prodigal angel
who has finally returned home.
Hildegard’s vision of the world as a continuing creation causes her to view
nature as indispensable to the redemption of humanity. Our attitude towards
our environment is for Hildegard a measure of our spirituality. This
ecological theme—common today, but very rare in her time—is not present
in this particular text, but together with the other two themes addressed
here make Hildegard a woman and a seer of the present, as relevant to our
time as she might have been to hers. Even though she was born before the
intellectual explosion we call the Renaissance, her visions, poems and music
point to an era beyond the Middle Ages and even the Renaissance, in fact
beyond the enantiodromia of the first Christian aeon altogether. They point
to the new Aquarian age, the dawn of which we are beginning to experience
in our days. This—I hope and pray—will be an age of vivid color