On my way to her first opera, Hildegard, on Friday night, I was thinking again about Sarah Kirkland Snider’s music, and how I might describe an album like Unremembered to somebody who had never heard it. I surprised myself with the absurd phrase psychedelic folk—surprised, since her music has always struck me as grounded and unpretentious, not “hallucinatory” per se—but if you were talking about an album from the 70s that used tape delays the way Snider uses imitation, blurring the edges around the harmonies and orchestration, what else would you call it? Anyway, it was just a passing thought. I shrugged it off.
A couple hours later, I was sitting at the Prototype Festival’s New York premiere of Hildegard, and all of a sudden the word “psychedelic” didn’t seem all that absurd. If you’ve read my profile(s) of Snider and the making of her opera for Parterre Box, you might remember a couple of things about this project: that music director Gabriel Crouch (who expertly led the outstanding NOVUS Ensemble here) raved about Snider’s orchestrations, and that one of the things that got her obsessed with Hildegard von Bingen’s story was Hildegard’s lifelong, debilitating, chronic headaches (Snider suffers from chronic migraine, which some scholars suspect may have caused Hildegard’s visions). But I wasn’t prepared for how acutely Snider would apply the orchestra towards sonifying the throb and shimmer of a headache. It was so intense—it was so vivid—and yet, it was oddly lovely, and not quite like anything I’d heard before.
The projections in Elkhanah Pulitzer’s production, designed by Deborah Johnson, likewise managed to seem persuasively hallucinatory, pretty, and new throughout the piece, evoking Hildegard’s recorded visions while also suggesting that those images were only a simplified rendering of something deeper, stranger, and more complex.
This was my favorite thing about the piece: how weird it was. Pulitzer’s production inserts strange, crow-headed figures without explanation, like the marginalia in illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages. (“Weird Medieval guys,” social media would call them.) Snider’s visions don’t depict Jesus or any recognizable Mary, but some other masked, female figure—God isn’t a patriarch here, but instead appears as some mysterious aspect of the Divine.
I only wished it could have been weirder. Snider’s music was so delicious during Hildegard’s visions that I kept yearning for the next one whenever the action returned to the “real world.” The dizzying interplay of high soprano voices weaving in ensemble—incredible! Just beautiful stuff.
But—although keen composer of dramatic scenes—Snider hasn’t written a libretto that lives up to the strangeness of her subject. I’d read the libretto before, and even seen duets and arias previewed in concert, but seeing the action onstage I was struck by how familiar the story beats in Hildegard were. And by “familiar” I mean familiar from Hollywood melodrama, not “familiar” as in the rich archetypal familiarity of the great opera libretti—the way that Hoffmansthal adopts the conventions of bedroom farce or the quest-romance only to warp them into something subtly more dangerous.
And this should have felt dangerous. This is a blasphemous opera, a story about love between nuns, an oppressive church hierarchy, and acts of cruelty and violence. But the drama comported all too easily with my modern liberal sensibilities: other than a satisfying moment when a villain of the piece, Father Cuno, defends his apparent grasping for ecclesiastical glory (and resources) by pointing out how many more patients the abbey could serve, I never felt that I was in danger of agreeing with him. I never really wondered whether Hildegard’s visions might be ”mere” hallucinations, or whether her love for her fellow nun, Richardis von Stade, might be unhealthy. Instead, I felt comfortable. I wish I could have felt just a little… well… yeah. Weirder about it all.
While Pulitzer and Johnson’s visuals were rich and satisfying, Laurel Jenkins’ movement choreography for the figures in Hildegard’s visions could have hit a little harder, with something closer to the abstract geometry of postures you see in a Medieval illustration (or a Robert Wilson production, RIP), to complete the effect created by Pulitzer’s attractive tableaux by bringing an equal sharpness and unity.
Other than that, the cast was fully committed—it was easy to believe that Nola Richardson, as Hildegard, was indeed a saint. Her part often sits very high, and it took her light, clear soprano just a moment to ease into it in her first appearance, but other than a few moments in which it seemed that the amplification system was bugging out on her, she gave a lovely and compelling vocal performance. Mikaela Bennett, as Richardis, fairly beamed star power straight out into the audience, giving a brilliantly colored and detailed interpretation, and the intertwining of soprano lines
Baritone David Adam Moore, as Abbot Cuno, gave an appropriately dark and authoritative performance both dramatically and vocally; Roy Hage, as Volmar, seemed to struggle a little more with Snider’s challenging tenor part, which lingered in his upper registers and sat heavily in the break.
As a Sarah Kirkland Snider fan from way back, Hildegard is a piece I’ve been looking forward to with curiosity and more than a little excitement. She’s definitely shown a new side of her artistry here, composing a thrilling, brilliantly colored, dramatically score. Of course it’s not a perfect piece—but a truly great libretto is hard to find, and I know from my conversations with Snider that if she hadn’t written this text herself, the piece might never have happened. As it is, I’m deeply grateful for the chance to see and hear the arrival of a brilliant new opera composer, and desperate to hear what she does next.
