Ordo Virtutum

The spine resists the subtractive test. The Souls’ lament gives Anima her reason to leave; her leaving lets the Devil speak; the Virtues’ procession is the company she has left; her return is wounded, so the Virtues must receive what they warned against; and the binding of the Devil is the drama’s one act. Remove the prologue and the drama loses its frame in salvation history; remove the closing chorus and the soul’s wounds lose their answer in Christ’s. The give is in the middle, and it is large. The Virtues present themselves one after another, each with a short declaration and a choral answer, and several stations, Verecundia, Disciplina and Innocentia among them, could go without a step of the argument lost. A litany is additive by nature, and a third of the work is litany.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and part of it is Hildegard’s own. The soul does not leave virtue from malice. She leaves because the garment of the body is heavy and she is impatient to enjoy the world God made, and the Devil’s offer is simply the world. Her fall is fatigue and appetite, not rebellion, and her return is wounded, not cleansed: the Virtues receive her with her wounds. The second disclosure is made through sound and is credited in full: evil is the one voice that cannot sing, and damnation is shown as exclusion from harmony, not as a rival power. Held at 8.0 because the condition is largely given by the doctrine the work illustrates, the figures name their meanings, and the human state is disclosed in one figure, for a small share of the work.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Height is reached by beauty more than by terror, and it recurs. The Virtues’ choral answers rise again and again in wide arching lines, and the closing chorus, “In principio omnes”, is the summit: creation greening in the beginning, then the Father shown the wounds of his Son. Anima’s return, a solo voice low and broken before the full company, is the drama’s one moment of pathos. The Devil’s shouts give the sublime of dread a negative form, noise breaking into song. Held below the top on frequency and on range of register. Much of the procession is formulaic declaration at one level of intensity; the height is a height of radiance, with little of the transport through conflict that the highest concert works carry.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The archetype is built, not evoked, and it bears weight: the soul’s fall and return, the prodigal’s story told of every soul, set inside the psychomachia, the war of virtues and vices for the soul, inside the history of salvation from the Patriarchs to the wounds of Christ. The binding of the Devil by Victoria, at the command of Humilitas, is the old figure of the adversary chained. What holds the axis below the gate is the rubric’s own line: the particular must remain particular. Allegory begins from the archetype, and its figures are the archetype named. Anima is the one figure with a history, and even she is every soul; the Virtues are told apart by what they declare, not by who they are. Myth built, on a frame inherited from Prudentius and from scripture, with the particular thin.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The inheritance is twelfth-century sung drama, which dramatised scripture and the liturgy: the visit to the tomb in the Easter Quem quaeritis dialogues, the shepherds and the Magi, the wise and foolish virgins of the Sponsus, the Fleury plays. The departures are several. A drama whose story is not in scripture, an allegory of the soul set to music, two and a half centuries and more before the vernacular morality plays. Text and music by one named author, and that author a woman writing for a community of women. One speaking role in a sung drama, so that the opposition of speech and song becomes the moral law. Melodies of a formulaic design that is her own, not the inherited plainchant of the office. The stake was real but bounded: the work was made for her own house, not for a public that could refuse it.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Change the form and the work loses what it knows. What it knows is that virtue is consonance and evil its absence, and only a sung form can make that a fact. Recast as a spoken play, the Devil is one more speaker among many and the work’s law disappears; recast as a series of songs, the soul has no journey. Monophony is form too: the Virtues sing in one line, so the community is heard as one voice, and Anima’s solo lines, alone against it, are heard as separation. The Virtues sing in turn and the chorus answers, so the procession becomes a rite in which the soul’s absence is felt. The joint is the procession, a sequence of declarations that the Virtues fill, where a different number of stations would change little of what the work knows.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The evidence is real and short. Scholarly return began in earnest in the late twentieth century: editions of the text and music, a collection of critical studies, and a large literature since on Hildegard’s music, her theology and her place in the history of women’s writing. The questions stay open: whether and how the work was performed in her own house; who sang the Virtues and who spoke the Devil; how the melodies were sung in time; whether instruments joined them; whether Anima is the soul of a novice, of every Christian, or of one particular nun. Performances answer them in widely different tempos and stagings. Held at 8.0 by the record, not the promise: some fifty years of return against eight centuries of none, and much of the literature reads the work as part of Hildegard’s whole output, so its share cannot be separated.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, and they part far. The field is twelfth-century sung drama and chant. The force is high, about 8.6: the work showed that a sung drama could stage an inner life in allegory, without scripture’s plot, and that the opposition of song and speech could carry its moral law. That is a reorganisation of possibility. The reach is low, about 6.4: no medieval performance is recorded, no copy with music beyond the one book is known, and no line runs from it to the later morality plays, which found the form again by other roads. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the redirection came eight centuries late, in performance and reputation rather than composition, when the work became central to the revival of Hildegard’s music and to the recovery of women composers.

Score: 7.5 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole: text and melodies in one manuscript, the Riesencodex, with the pitches legible on staff lines; the rhythm was never notated, which leaves the performed form partly in doubt. Presence is the charge. No performance is recorded for about eight centuries, until the late twentieth, and the work’s living presence, on recordings and in festival and university stagings, is some fifty years old, real but specialist. The fabric holds: the manuscript survives, and nothing is lost to decay. Centuries of age with long silence fall on the desk’s step at 8.7 to 9.2. The whole survival of the form lifts the work off that floor; the length of the silence holds it near it, at 8.8.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Command of the medium bears weight. The melodic writing is the work’s chief craft: wide-ranging lines, recurring formulas that bind the Virtues’ music into one idiom, melismas placed on the words the theology needs, and a Devil defined by having no line at all. The dramaturgy of voice is economical: one soloist against a chorus, groups against individuals, song against speech. The costs are real. The Latin, dictated and corrected by secretaries, is visionary, compressed and sometimes rough in syntax; it carries striking images, viriditas, greenness, the best known of her words, but it is not a poet’s command of the language. The Virtues’ declarations are cut to one pattern, and characterisation by melody is slight. Monophony is not charged; it is the medium, and within it the command is high.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the Devil’s shouts and the closing chorus’s greening creation. One law governs them, the law of the work’s title: order, the right placing of every voice in a consonant whole, and its negation. The Devil is outside it by having no melody; the Souls in prison lament inside it; Anima leaves it and returns to it; the closing chorus sets it at the scale of the cosmos, from creation through the wounds of Christ to the bending of the knee. The Patriarchs and Prophets of the prologue and the closing chorus frame the drama in the same history. The strain is the ending, which turns from Anima to Christ’s wounds and the Father: prepared by her wounds, it does not name the drama’s protagonist. The range governed is wide in theology and narrow in register.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The orders held are integrated, not listed. The soul, in Anima’s weariness, desire, fall and penitence; the body, as the garment and as the prison of the Souls; the sacred, as the whole medium of the work; salvation history, from the Patriarchs to the wounds of Christ; the community, as a company of Virtues singing one line; the natural order, as the greening of creation; the world, as what the Devil offers. They are held on one law of consonance. What holds the axis at 7.4, the lowest of the twelve, is absence: the family, labour, the state and history outside sacred history do not appear, and the world is present only as temptation, never as a place. The figure says how many orders an allegory of seventy minutes holds.

Score: 7.4 / 10