The Ordo Virtutum of Hildegard von Bingen ed. by Audrey Ekdahl Davidson (review)

Reviews8 1 if not a logical impossiblity, assumes a spiritual cohesiveness that few would attribute to contemporary audiences. Certainly the idea of moral givens mitigates against the intellectual and aleatory pleasures of jumping between present and absent versions of one's own subjectivity. Less of an achievement than his Fields of Play in Modern Drama, Whitaker's Tom Stoppard is nevertheless a useful and entertaining book. Readers will find valuable contextual information for the plays, including the often conflicting observations of first-night reviewers. Interestingly, when he plays off (and thus disrupts) journalistic judgments, Whitaker effectively performs at the level of discourse his own theory of collaborative play. This is perhaps the book's greatest strength. Though a complete theory of audience response eludes him, Whitaker succeeds more than most critics in creating a vivid sense of what Stoppard calls his "events" in the theater. ELIN DIAMOND Rutgers University The Ordo Virtutum of Hildegard von Bingen, ed. Audrey Ekdahl Davidson . Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1985. Pp. ii + 38. $13.95 (paper). Interest in Hildegard von Bingen as a poet and mystic began about the time of Peter Dronke's Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages (1970), was extended to her dramatic competence in Richard Axton's European Drama of the Early Middle Ages (1974), and in the 1980's has embraced her, modestly, as also a composer. Her three interdependent medieval artistries are expertly and fully revealed in Audrey Davidson's recent edition of Hildegard's Ordo Virtutum, a practical edition prepared from Wiesbaden Hessische Landesbibliothek Codex 2. This edition is more accurate than Barbara Thornton's "Hildegard von Bingen: Die Rekonstruktion eines Mysterien-Drama aus dem 12. Jahrhundert," Neuland IV (Cologne, 1983), and should be received into the medieval repertory of performable music-drama. The Davidson and Thornton musical transcriptions into modern notation are in free rhythm, and work better that way than in the mensural, even for some of the less melismatic items. The consequence of this appraisal is potentially important. Many of us have been of the opinion that a twelfth-century composer would not compose melodies in free rhythm, this style being the unique property of the traditional liturgy and not to be profaned by contemporary mortal imitation. This hypothesis trembles a little when confronted with Hildegard's composition, and leaves one entertaining the practicality of free-rhythm interpretation of such a piece as the Archangel's fantasy on Quern quaeritis in the Fleury Visitatio and of such of those troubadour songs as are through-composed (e.g., Vidal's "Ainz non morir" and Ventadorn's "The Lark"). A considerable resistance to this revised hypothesis is that Hildegard's Virtutum is in unrhymed prose while the pieces cited above are metrical and rhymed. There seems little likelihood that metrical verses, with rhymes to phrase them, would be fitted to free-rhythm melody. Hildegard's composition of liturgical song may have been licensed by her rank and station as an 82Comparative Drama abbess, a situation quite different from that of the Fleury composer and the seculars Vidal and Ventadorn. Another remarkable feature of the Virtutum is the liveliness of this morality play, with a host of allegorical figures as in Everyman and The Castle of Perseverance. The musical element of Hildegard's allegorical piece lifts it onto a gracious and emotional level of dramatic experience. Without such elevation this kind of drama tends to die didactically on the vine. The production of this edition of the Virtutum by the Society for Old Music under the Davidsons' direction at Kalamazoo in May 1984 demonstrated how dynamic the work is, and even from the printed edition the reader will sense that this is more than an oratorio, that it shares a dramatic power and poignancy with the great church music-dramas of the period. In another sense it is an early harbinger of the Renaissance masque: of The Tempest and Ben Jonson and the Milton-Lawes Comus. Experience with the other medieval plays indicates that the first modern productions use the Latin words, and those who are Latinists disdain the notion of translation and performance in English. Later productions, however, seeking more audiences, begin to experiment with English. Without...