Téléchargez le livret intégral en format PDF ... - Abeille Musique

sustain the New. Hildegard closes the Sequence with a prayer that the people of Trier may never revert
to the paganism in which Eucharius found them, but may always re-enact the redemptive sacrifice of
Christ in the form of the Mass.
With superb control Hildegard in O viridissima virga 6 elaborates the image of Mary as the branch of
Jesse. Mary’s fertility endows the animal and vegetable kingdoms with new life and brings mankind to
God through the sheer joy of contemplating the Divine agency.
O presul vere civitatis 7 celebrates Saint Disibod, the patron of the monastery where Hildegard was
raised. She composed this sequence in response to Abbot Cuno of Disibodenberg who wrote to her
asking for a copy of anything ‘that God reveals to you about our patron’. She certainly sent him this
poem; we do not know whether it was accompanied by the music. Hildegard evokes the itinerant
hermit’s life that brought Disibod to the place later to be the site of the monastery, and emphasizes his
founder’s role through a stream of architectural, cloistral imagery. The ‘finial-stone’ which introduces
this imagery is, of course, Christ (see, for example, Matthew 21: 42).
O Ecclesia 8 celebrates Saint Ursula who, according to legend, was martyred with eleven thousand
virgins at Cologne. Ursula, a woman who had rejected an earthly marriage for a heavenly one, who had
died in Cologne, and who led a company of Christian women, naturally occupied a special place in
Hildegard’s devotion. There were relics of Ursula at Disibodenberg where Hildegard had been raised,
and Elisabeth of Schonau (a mystic whom Hildegard knew) created a stir in 1156/7 with her visions of
Ursula and her companions. Hildegard does not appear to have been directly influenced by these
visions, but this is her most sustained response to a legend that was clearly popular and much in the
minds of clerics and laymen.
A NOTE ON PERFORMANCE
Medieval Latin has no exact equivalent of the verb ‘to perform’; it is a language which does not
precisely identify the self-conscious and extrovert activity that we associate with ‘performing’. This is
suggestive in a number of ways and, as far as the music of Hildegard is concerned, it is easy to
understand. Consider the habits of medieval monastic readers: the more spiritual meaning a text was
thought to embody, the more they internalized it by a process which they frequently compared to
digestion, absorbing the words in tranquillity, then ruminating upon them to release the nourishing
spiritual senses.
Plainchant was often approached in a similar frame of mind. Ideally, singers were to allow their activity
to absorb the whole spirit and body, inducing a state of meditative calm and so intensifying the quality
of devotional life. Distractions, such as the intrusion of instrumental decorations or of extrovert vocal
4