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A Confusion of Medieval Sainthood New York
Gerald W. LynchTheater, John Jay College
01/09/2026 - & January 10, 11, 14, 2026
Sarah Kirkland Snider: Hildegard
Nola Richardson (Hildegard von Bingen), Mikaela Bennett (Richardis von Stade), David Adam Moore (Abbot Cuono), Roy Hage (Volmar), Blythe Gaissert (Clementia, Margravine von Stade, Angel 2), Raha Mirzadegan (Gerta, Angel 1), Patrick Bessenbacher (Mechtild), Pal Chwe Minchul An (Otto), Chloë Engel (Faceless Woman), Sam Kann, Maia Sauer (Supernumeraries)
Novus Instrumental Ensemble, Gabriel Crouch (Music Director)
Beth Morrison (Creative Producer), Beth Morrison Projects (Producer, Co‑commissioner with Aspen Music Festival and School), Elkhanah Pulitzer (Director), Marsha Ginsberg (Scenic Designer), Molly Ireland (Costume Designer), Pablo Santiago (Lighting Designer), Deborah Johnson (Artwork and Projections Designer), Novus Ensemble Prototype (Presenter)
S. K. Snider/N. Richardson (© Drew Tommons/Suzanne Vinnik)
To 12th Century bakers, she was the creator of Hildegardplätzchen–Hildegard’s spice‑filled “Happy Cake”.
“Glance at the sun. See the moon and the stars. Gaze at the beauty of the Earth’s greenings. Now, think. The music of heaven is in all things.”
Hildegard von Bingen
“Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.”
Dorothy Day
To her devotees through the centuries, she was the ultimate polymath: biographer, mystic, composer, poet, compiler of saintly lives and medicines (including her cake), a triple‑threat as administrator and activist.
As postscript, in a century when women’s literacy was virtually iniquitous, Hildegard was almost a manic epistolarist, writing over 400 letters to religious celebrities around the world.
Had MGM decided she was movie material, Hilldegard wouldn’t have been played by a soulful Ingrid Bergman. A zesty Katharine Hepburn or Rosalind Russell would have fit the bill, scribbling those letters, warmly ordering fellow nuns to help those outside the convent, plagued by dreams. (Albeit with some spiritual dancing interludes, as we had in this New York premiere.)
I came across Hildegard’s poetry many years ago and fell in love with her art and subjects. Images of God, Jesus and Mary were rare. Instead she praised the earth and earth’s music, she was a pantheist of nature, an unassuming tree‑lover, she glorified humanity and embraced–with the enthusiasm and images of Rilke or Blake–a universe far transcending ritualistic Medieval heavens and hells.
In sum, Saint Hildegard was less a holier‑than‑thou mystic, she was a human artist.
Composer Sarah Kirkland Snider wrote an opera where Hildegard did have a multitude of persona. She was a repressed homosexual, an activist against her male superiors and a mystic whose visions were put on the screen.
And (I hate to say it) a rather tedious woman.
“Tedious” is injudicious for Ms. Snider is more than a reputedly deft composer, she is a writer with the utmost reverence for her subject. Ms. Snider spent eight years researching this 12th Century all‑encompassing genius. She traveled to Hildegard’s sacred European venues, she researched the possible medical source of these visions (a migraine?) and stitched together trenchant scenelets along with the mildly hallucinatory screen images of candles and dancers and unearthly colors.
R. Hage/M. Bennett (© Courtesy of the Artist/Matthew Murphy)
So we come back to this opera, in the spacious Gerald Lynch Theater and sung with the most glorious high notes by both Nola Richardson (Hildegard) and her near‑lover Mikaela Bennett. That two sopranos had the equal range was rare indeed. One imagines what Richard Strauss would have done with it.
Still, that large stage often dwarfed the objects: a circular‑cage, a bed, the furniture wheeled around the stage by demon‑faced (or Bosch‑faced) movers.
The dialogue, beautifully spoken (we hardly needed the sous‑titres) was eloquent, the words were not only clear, they were written with judicious care.
No doubt this opera was written with devotion. Missing, though, was anything approaching emotion or changes of feeling. Other stage works of this time–Menotti’s Saint of Bleecker Street or Puccini’s Suor Angelica–were filled with feeling, atmospheres, relationships. The repressions, the prayers, the tragedies had (for lack of a better word) oomph.
Instead we had a series of minor “scenes”, each devout, each sung in nuanced tones which, whatever the volume, were couched in whispers. Are Hildegard’s visions to be judged by the Pope? Ms. Richardson gives us nary another thought. Does she have a brilliant concept how the epileptic Mikaela Bennett will stay out of the 12th Century loony bin? The scenelet closes and we are left hanging.
Does Hildegard’s blossoming love affair almost come to fruition? Of course not. And if it did, the two women would be burned at the stake. Yet not once do we feel the tautness, the near‑mania of their closeness.
Ms. Snyder rarely nears operatic tautness or tension. She hints at it, extolling pictures and words, yet cuts herself off. Ditto for her talk with her monk‑admirer, beautifully sung by Roy Hage. He alludes to both kinds of homosexual love, then cuts across to the old religious excuse.
And while these ruses were probably necessary in Medieval erotica, it decreased the emotional depth of a 21st Century opera.
We might have had two choices for the music. Either an operatic set of emotive modifications to break up the conversations. Or (what I would have preferred and might have missed), Hildegard’s own chants cum songs, beautiful for their time. They could have jarred listeners, taking them out of two hours of recitations.
The instrumental ensemble–the Novus Ensemble of harp, three winds, string quartet, well-conducted by Gabriel Crouch–served mainly as background.
This was Sarah Kirkland Snider’s first opera and was obviously a work of sincerity and solemnity. In my humble opinion, too much solemnity. For obviously Saint Hildegard of Bingen never took an Oath of Silence. Quite the opposite.
Exhorted by images, inspired by reformist, at times revolutionary ideas, she was a highly dramatic personage in the age of equally eloquent Abélard and Héloïse.
Ms. Snider assembled great talents here including her own. Hildegard could well have been a dramatic song‑cycle. As an opera, I fear it was far from being truly operatic.
Harry Rolnick
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