Hildegard von Bingen

Hildegard von Bingen is the earliest composer in this catalog whose life we know in real detail. Born in 1098 in the Rhineland, she was given to a Benedictine monastery as a child and spent her whole life in religious communities, eventually founding her own convent near the town of Bingen and leading it as abbess.

Music was only one part of an astonishing range. She recorded the visions she had experienced since childhood in illustrated books, wrote on medicine and the natural world, invented a private language, and corresponded with popes and emperors who sought her advice. Her chants set her own Latin poetry, and their melodies soar and swoop far more freely than most church music of her time. She died in 1179, and centuries later her music found a huge new audience on recordings.

Start with the Symphonia, her collection of chants, then Ordo Virtutum, a sung morality play in which the Virtues battle the devil for a human soul.