Greatest Hits of 1150

After satisfying ourselves that the bums had been reinstated on Election Day, we repaired to the Chapel to hear the Cologne-based group Sequentia take on Hildegard von Bingen. With characteristic Teutonic rigor, Sequentia was not content merely to have recorded her entire musical oeuvre, but felt obliged to go on tour to present a stage version of Hildegard's most memorable work, the Ordo Virtutem, or Play of the Virtues.

It's an eleventh-century plainsong romp whose zany antics-one character crosses from stage left to center stage at one point-are sure to leave you howling. Take your favorite Gregorian chant, add a soupcon of sanctimony, stir in a little New Age pretension, and you have the twentieth century's version of Hildegard von Bingen.

The Sibyl of the Rhine was born exactly 900 years ago and, as her parents' tenth child, was naturally tithed to the church, where she studied with a shut-in named Jutta who tried and failed to teach her to write. In the course of blinding migraine headaches, Hildegard received from God complete musical scores, scriptural commentaries in shaky Latin and numerous one-liners good enough to persuade both St. Bernard and Pope Eugenius, who gave her permission to get on with it. Though it was not until the Romantic era that the world decided great art required great suffering, Hildegard's migraines set the stage for a later generation and made it inevitable that we moderns would adopt her as a kind of eleventh-century poster child for talented and misunderstood women.

She kept company with a priest named Vollmar who trailed her for decades acting as, so they say, her secretary. Illiterate herself, Hildegard dictated to Vollmar the first description by a Benedictine nun of the female orgasm; Sequentia's latest CD of her music is called Canticles of Ecstasy. I report the facts, nothing more.

Around 1150, pressed for a sequel to her first hit, "Know the Ways of the Lord," she completed the Ordo Virtutem, the Western world's first recorded morality play-some even call it our first opera. Having played many an orchestra pit in my time-and I have the scars to prove it-I must say, this was unlike any opera I've seen. The sopranos were skinny, and no one died or got married.

The Virtues were attired in tasteful though somewhat shapeless gowns of pale blue polyester, chastely high-necked, floor-length affairs with matching hats meant to suggest nimbuses. The Soul, for her part, was dressed in a black body suit, with a white cloak which she finally hurled to the ground when the incessant puling and lecturing of the virtues became too much for her. Satan, who needed a shave, sported Dockers and a black hood.

Were you to watch Ordo Virtutem for the plot, as Dr. Johnson said of Richardson's insufferable first novel, you would hang yourself. It begins with protestations of mutual admiration and some virtual backslapping, all in Latin, between the Virtues and Anima, the soul. Enter the devil, shouting. It turns out the soul was less steadfast than she had let on, and off she trots in the polyonymous Beelzebub's charge.

Half an hour later it transpires that Humility has been appointed queen of the Virtues, which occasions a fair amount of congratulation. Humility leads them in boasting of her puissance and outright savvy, and they all take turns preening. One of the Virtues-I think it was Patience-actually passed out on stage and lost her nimbus, unable to bear up under the bright lights and endless posturing, and had to retire under cover of an alto solo, though she recovered in time for the curtain call. Anyway, sure enough, the soul returns, sickened of worldly ambition, and the Virtues take her in after stiffening at sight of the lurking devil in a gesture reminiscent of The Bride of Frankenstein, though Satan is after all only trying to do his job. The Virtues understandably brag a bit over their victory, and they wind it up in time for the audience to get to Le Grande Café before closing time.