BREAKING NEWS — Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Hildegard, based on the life of the 12th-century German abbess Hildegard von Bingen, is the winner of the 2026 Award for Best New Opera conferred by the Music Critics Association of North America. The honor, which recognizes both musical and theatrical excellence, is given annually to an operatic world premiere presented in North America during the previous calendar year. Commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects and the Aspen Music Festival, Hildegard, directed by Elkhanah Pulitzer and conducted by Gabriel Crouch, had its world premiere Nov. 5, 2025, at the Annenberg Center in Beverly Hills and its East Coast premiere at the 2026 Prototype Festival in New York.
The opera was selected by the MCANA Awards Committee co-chaired by Heidi Waleson, opera critic of The Wall Street Journal, and George Loomis, longtime contributor to the Financial Times and Musical America. The committee is rounded out by MCANA president Arthur Kaptainis, contributor to Ludwig van Toronto and former music critic of the Montreal Gazette; John Rockwell, former critic and arts editor of The New York Times and a regular correspondent for Opera (UK) and Musical America; and Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker.
The Awards Committee stated: “This compelling work of historical fiction explores the life and mind of the 12th-century Benedictine abbess, visionary, and composer Hildegard von Bingen. Snider’s well-crafted libretto sets the action at a biographical turning point in 1147, when Hildegard’s transcribed visions were submitted to the pope, who would declare her to be either a prophet or a heretic.
“This complex heroine, who stands up to the power of the church and is disturbed by the nature of her feelings for a young novice, is captured in Snider’s distinctive, haunting music, which reaches its apogee in the brilliantly explosive visions. Remarkable timbral variety belies the small size of the accompanying ensemble, and throughout, the opera’s musical radiance illuminates Hildegard’s visceral connection with the divine.”
Hildegard was by any measure an extraordinary woman. Placed in a convent at age eight, as a kind of large-family tithe, she was cloistered for most of her 81 years. She was elected magistra (mistress) of her Benedictine convent at 36 and later founded two other convents. In 1147, the time frame of the opera, she applied for recognition of her visions as divinely inspired, eventually earning approval from Pope Eugene III, despite the skepticism and resistance of her male superiors. She became a powerful figure, skillfully navigating church politics at a time when women had virtually no voice in the Catholic hierarchy. Though long venerated as a saint, she was only canonized in 2012.
In a note for LA Opera, Snider wrote, “I have chronic migraines and first learned about Hildegard von Bingen through reading Oliver Sacks’s book Migraine, in which Sacks popularized a theory suggesting that Hildegard’s visions were a result of migraine.” In the opera, Hildegard’s visions often appear as the aftermath of clashes with the overbearing Abbot Cuno, who regards her as a talented heretic too useful to the community to banish.
Beyond her spiritual vocation, Hildegard was a writer, philosopher, healer, pharmacist, natural scientist, and prolific composer. She was largely unknown outside of Germany until around 1980, when the discovery and recording of her prolific chant output by groups like Sequentia and Gothic Voices helped to spur interest in her many talents in the English-speaking world, as well as introducing plainchant to wider audiences.
Hildegard has become a feminist model in admiration of the influence she was able to wield during a misogynistic era. She is also regarded as a queer icon for what is thought to be a romantic relationship with Richardis von Stade, a young novitiate who ran away from another convent and was taken in by Hildegard’s convent and who became her artistic helpmate. There is no historical evidence for a lesbian relationship between the two, but the opera makes the mutual attraction explicit and a major point of inner conflict for the homophobic Hildegard.
Hildegard is portrayed as being strong-willed, sometimes manipulative, and unafraid of defying her superiors. “I was awestruck by her triumph over self-doubt, illness and the otherwise impenetrable social barriers of her time to become the first woman in the history of the Catholic Church to speak and write in the name of God,” observed Snider. “If Hildegard had been a man, she would be as well-known as Thomas Aquinas.”
Snider’s music creates for the listener a distinctive and logical sound world. Though the score is anchored by plainchant, the overall musical language is contemporary, combining a kind of minimalism with flowing melodic writing. For a listener, the non-chant music is untethered to a particular tonality or form, yet it always makes sense.
Hildegard is economically scored for eight singers — four men (monks) and four women (nuns and angels) — and nine instruments. The music contrasts the worlds of masculine and feminine with style and sonority. Monks sing plainchant in Latin, sometimes reinforced at the lower octave to suggest an unmovable rules-bound male establishment. As nuns, the women also sing chant, but as the angels appearing in Hildegard’s visions, they pour out cascades of soaring, ethereal counterpoint, or close harmony. When the magistra finally receives news that the Vatican has validated her visions, Hildegard and the women burst into jubilant melismas suggesting the composer Hildegard von Bingen’s ecstatic style.
Most of the solo vocal writing consists of flowing, arioso-style dialogue; even extended monologues don’t quite sound like arias, though the vocal demands are often operatic. The speech is so natural that it would work as pure spoken theater; the language is formal but unpretentious. Under these conversations, the accompaniment uses repeated chords interspersed with fluid passages for color and mood; sonorities are expressive where talk remains understated. Extended interludes accompany Hildegard’s visions with the fuller sonorities of winds and string quintet. And throughout, the harp, flowing yet percussive, reminds us of the ecclesiastical context.
Though based on Hildegard’s biography, Hildegard the opera is fiction, rearranging and embellishing life events to create compelling theater around the conflicts in her life: struggle with the monastic establishment over theological legitimacy and artistic autonomy, the need to make art to express her faith, and her own unwanted romantic feelings. Within the quiet confines of a closed, rule-bound community, Snider creates strong personalities battling a rigid power structure in pursuit of their own truths. The melodramatic ending is pure fiction—though credibly based on historical conditions—but it propels the personal story to a powerful and satisfying end.
