BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Once again, Beth Morrison Projects’ alliance with Los Angeles Opera Off-Grand has produced stimulating work away from the opera company’s main stage. This time, it was the world premiere of Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Hildegard, a peek at the astonishing life of the medieval German abbess/composer/writer/visionary/all-around polymath Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179).
Venturing well off the main campus downtown, this production landed in the Bram Goldsmith Theater in Beverly Hills’ Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts (known simply as The Wallis). And the 500-seat, intimate, tech-friendly Goldsmith turned out to be a near-ideal space for this lovely evening-length opera that is partly on-point historically and partly a fantasy with some modern-day agendas to push.
According to evidently plentiful accounts, Hildegard was a devoted servant of God, a creative genius in many fields, and a rebel who also knew how to shrewdly play Christian politics. She left more surviving musical compositions than anyone else, male or female, of her time. Though frail and often racked with physical pain, she lived to the age of 81, way beyond typical life expectancy in the Middle Ages.
Yet Hildegard really did not come into prominence until the 1990s, when the classical-music world resurrected her in the wake of the decade’s Gregorian-chant fad. Suddenly, she became the patron saint of women musicians past and present who were finally starting to become recognized in a male-oriented profession. Recordings of her chants started to proliferate. Germany even issued a 10 DM commemorative Hildegard coin in 1998 for the 900th anniversary of her birth.
Snider herself writes that she was attracted to the Hildegard story around the time of the revival when a book by Oliver Sacks suggested that the abbess’ mystical visions came to her during migraine headaches — a malady that Snider also suffers from. Hildegard is Snider’s first opera, and unlike many other recent newcomers to the genre, she’s a natural. She has always written beautifully for the voice in major works I’ve heard (the orchestral song cycles Penelope and Unremembered, or the Mass for the Endangered), placing her lines in comfortable ranges with often intricate interplay between the singers.
That ability to write for voices certainly serves Snider well in Hildegard. The goal of her game, as before, is to make luminous lines and tangles of gorgeous vocal sound, backed by a 10-piece chamber ensemble led by Gabriel Crouch — a singer himself (and former member of The King’s Singers). Discreet, low-volume electronics also act as scene-setting material. By now, the pop-song ingredients that once mixed with the classical stylings in Penelope have been filtered out.
Without giving away the outcome of the plot — which the skimpy three-sentence summary in the program seems at pains to prevent anyway — the story line centers upon the year 1147, when Hildegard is middle aged. She is joined by figures from the historical record — her friend and illustrator Richardis von Stade, who is depicted as an epileptic, and her immediate superior and sparring partner, Abbot Cuno, who sees Hildegard’s visions as an asset for his own ambitions in the church hierarchy while discouraging her creative talents.
Snider, who wrote the music and the libretto, plays a bit fast and loose with the timeline, locales, and motivations of the action for dramatic purposes; for example, the episode where Hildegard is worshipping at the grave of a heretic whom she defended probably occurred around the end of her life. Also, while we know that Hildegard was very close to Richardis, Snider goes a little further, suggesting that the “divine love” between the two ripened into — well — an earthier form.
Snider’s score reminds me of the intimate ambience of some of Benjamin Britten’s chamber operas and later works, particularly in her frequent, prominent, delicate use of the harp. Not only that, another similarity with Britten is that Hildegard aims to speak for the outsider — and, questionably, the love that dared not speak its name. In Act II, she even sneaks in a doleful quote from the Act III Prelude of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, which can be interpreted as a reference to forbidden love of another variety.
The opera does peak in dramatic tension at a good point in Act II, though the long Act I has a stretch toward the end where one’s attention flags a bit. There are plenty of instrumental interludes, usually during Hildegard’s visions, and Snider makes use of the rear speakers of the theater for occasional booming strains of the Latin mass and streaks of vocal plainchant, the closest she comes to Hildegard’s own idiom. It’s a very pretty score, as one might expect from Snider, and the libretto gratefully pushes the story line forward.
Director Elkhanah Pulitzer, who made imaginative use of projections and video for her productions of John Adams operas, kept things simple and abstract/modern on the small Wallis stage, using a movable cube-like set with large circular openings representing the Abbot’s office, and often just a single modest bed. Artwork and projection designer Deborah Johnson interpreted Hildegard’s “visions” as dim, enigmatic galaxies and nebulae on the rear screen.
Soprano Nola Richardson usually sang Hildegard’s lines in a mellow, compassionate manner, the range of her part generally lower than that of Richardis, and toward the close of Act I she conveyed the tortured ambivalence of her character’s apparent battle with divine and carnal desires. Soprano Mikaela Bennett was an emotional Richardis, and she acted out her character’s epileptic seizures with frightening intensity. David Adam Moore’s Abbot Cumo sported a virile baritone in the service of rigid bureaucratic authority disguised as piety. Of the less-prominent roles, two capable tenors, Roy Hage and Patrick Bessenbacher, sang the parts of Volmar and Mechthild, respectively, and the most notable of mezzo-soprano Blythe Gaissert’s three roles was Margravine von Stade, the imperious mother of Richardis.
Whatever its historical deviations, Hildegard’s primary points ultimately ring true — the heroine’s determination to be her own person while maintaining allegiance to her faith, and to exercise and encourage creativity when such activities are forbidden upon penalty of excommunication. The latter especially resonates in these authoritarian times.
From here, the production moves on to the PROTOTYPE in New York at BRIC Arts Media Jan. 9-17, 2026, and the Aspen Music Festival and School in summer 2026.
