Sibyl of the Rhine-St. Hildegard of Bingen-Feast Day is 9/17

Manuscript taken by Soviets after World War II

St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179)

Sibyl of the Rhine

St. Hildegard of Bingen (also known as Hildegarde von Bingen (1098-1179) was a Christian mystic, Benedictine abbess, and polymath proficient in philosophy, musical composition, herbology, medieval literature, cosmology, medicine, biology, theology, and natural history.¹ She is often called the Sibyl of the Rhine.

Manuscript Plundered and Returned

Only two large collections of St. Hildegard of Bingen's music are extant. The twelfth-century manuscript. the Riesencodex, was almost lost during World War II surviving both bombing and plundering in Dresden in February 1945. It was appropriated by the Soviet Administration in 1947.²

Hochschul- und Landesbibliothek RheinMain:

As the Soviet army advanced from the east and the other allied forces from the west, much in their path was destroyed either by the invading armies themselves or by the retreating Germans, and further looting took place. While some of this looting was carried out by individual soldiers and civilians, the Russians raided as part of a larger, national strategy. In January 1944, they had already established a Trophy Commission with detailed lists of works of art that they planned to take from Germany as restitution for the destruction and theft by the Germans earlier in the war.³

Newly discovered facts relating to the return of the Riesencodex involve Margarete Kühn, a medievalist scholar, and the wife of an American military official who smuggled the Riesencodex back to the Hildegard Abbey.⁴ It has been digitized.⁵

Most famous composer of plainchant

St. Hildegard of Bingen is the most famous composer of plainchant, and her 77 liturgical chants and morality plays are in the repertoires of both religious congregations and classical and New Age artists. More works can be definitely attributed to Hildegard than any other composer from the Middle Ages. The melodic variety of Hildegard’s chant, ranging from the highly florid works of her early years to the more restrained chant, reflect her intimate familiarity with chant genres and the compositional practices of late medieval chant. ⁶

1. Barbara Newman. Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

2. Bain, Jennifer. “History of a Book: Hildegard of Bingen’s ‘Riesencodex’ and World War II.” Plainsong & medieval music 27.2 (2018): 143–170. (produced at the scriptorium of Hildegard's Rupertsberg monastery.)

3. Akinsha, Konstantin and Kozlov, Grigorii (with Hochfield, Sylvia), Beautiful Loot: The Soviet Plunder of Europe's Art Treasures (New York, 1995)

4. Bain, Jennifer. “History of a Book: Hildegard of Bingen’s ‘Riesencodex’ and World War II.” Plainsong & medieval music 27.2 (2018): 143–170.

5. Handschriften / SUCHE Autor = Hildegard und Sammlung = Handschriften [1-1] (hebis.de).

6. The Interntational Society of Hldegard von Bingen Studies.