Hildegard of Bingen SED DIABOLUS

A woman of many talents Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) was a prophetess, healer, naturalist, cosmologist, philosopher, artist, poet, musician, linguist and political advisor. But of her she said

‘I am a being without instruction, and I know nothing of the things of the outer world, but it is inwardly in my soul that I am instructed.’ At an early age Hildegard had the first visions that would mark her entire existence. At the age of eight, because of her poor health, she was placed in the Abbey of Disibodenberg by her noble parents. From her earliest childhood she claims to have had a magna pressura that invited her to speak and write under his inspiration, dispensing advice on practical and spiritual life and dealing with the most varied issues. Although she was a laywoman and not a clergywoman, i.e. an illiterate woman who had not been able to study in schools, she inexplicably knew how to write in the spoken and understood Latin of the learned, with technical competence on subjects ranging from natural sciences to medicine, linguistics to literature, philosophy to theology, law to politics. She called this inner voice the Light of the living God. Among the 77 Gregorian chants that St Idelgarda composed is this ‘Sed Diabolus’ dedicated to St Ursula. The text reads ‘But the devil, in his envy, was ashamed that he had left no work of God untouched’. I propose my arrangement for bassoon which, as the choral direction of the songs requires, is a kind of ‘description of the melody in the air’ without temporal scansion of the rhythm of the musical phrase.