Ordo Virtutum

Hildegard of Bingen composed Ordo Virtutum, the Order of the Virtues, around 1151, during the years she was relocating her community from the Disibodenberg to a new monastery she founded at Rupertsberg near Bingen. It survives complete in the same manuscript as her larger song collection, the Symphonia, with both text and music attributed to her, a double attribution no other surviving medieval drama can claim. The play is built as an allegorical contest for a single human soul, Anima, who abandons the seventeen Virtues, personified and each given her own melodic voice, for worldly pleasure before the Devil claims her, and is won back through the Virtues' intervention led by Humility. Historians of medieval drama call it the earliest morality play by more than a century, predating the genre's better known fifteenth century examples, and some musicologists have described it as the earliest surviving music drama with a plausible claim to the label opera, though that comparison is anachronistic and contested rather than settled. Scholarship on its first performance is not fully settled either: it may have marked the 1152 dedication of the new abbey church at Rupertsberg, or a ceremony consecrating new nuns into Hildegard's community, and the surviving evidence supports either occasion without confirming one over the other.

Hildegard gave every Virtue in Ordo Virtutum her own sung line, a compositional choice that was also a theological one: in her wider theology, music was the residue of the harmony Adam possessed in Eden and lost at the Fall, so that singing itself is a form of praise unavailable to fallen or rebellious beings. The Devil's part carries no melody at all. He shouts and declaims his lines while every other character, virtuous or merely human, sings, a staging choice scholars read as Hildegard making an argument about the nature of evil rather than merely a musical contrast: to Hildegard, harmony itself was evidence of divine order, and evil's defining trait was its exclusion from that order, its literal tonelessness.

The nuns of Hildegard's own convent performed the Virtues and the soul Anima, a female voice throughout, male clergy attached to the community sang the Patriarchs and Prophets who frame the action, and tradition holds that Volmar, Hildegard's provost and secretary, took the spoken role of the Devil himself. The play has drawn renewed performance and recording interest since the late twentieth century revival of interest in Hildegard's music generally, and modern stagings consistently preserve the spoken-versus-sung distinction as the work's most theologically loaded feature rather than treating it as a peculiarity to be smoothed over.