(Photo: © Claire Shovelton)

OperaWire: Hildegard von Bingen is one of the most storied figures of classical music. What drew you to her work and to retell the “Ordo Virtutum?”

Nwando Ebizie: My interest in Hildegard began in 2016 when I realized I had a neurological syndrome called Visual Snow Syndrome. Put simply, this means that I experience a different perceptual (mostly visual) reality to most people, including a visual field full of translucent pointillist noise, swirling patterns, auras, light halos and photographic-like afterimages. I explored the neuroscience of perception with my collaborator, neuroscientist Dr. Eva Bracey, and thought about how artists throughout history may have approached their own unique perceptual reality.

Hildegard kept coming up in my mind as a woman who was not only a visionary polymath, but also, uniquely for the time, one whose visions and creativity were preserved and immortalized in her text and illuminations. Through reading works such as Fiona Maddocks’ “Hildegard of Bingen: The Woman of Her Age” and Hildegard’s own books “Scivias” and “Physica” and her letters, I was drawn into her world.

I studied medieval morality plays at university and with Hildegard, I was struck by her philosophy of feminine virtues and the soul as an everywoman as opposed to the everyman. (She wrote the piece for her nuns to perform). It is interesting that still, in this day and age, it is rare to have an all-female cast, an all-women’s story without a woman being a victim of male violence in an opera or a love interest. I feel this is something needed in our culture. “Ordo Virtutum” is an uplifting piece, created for women to celebrate a philosophy that then as now is needed.

(Photo: © Claire Shovelton)

OperaWire: Did Hildegard’s compositional style influence your composition of this new work?

NE: I certainly began by reading various versions of her scores (of different works) in modern and ancient notation. In an early residency at Snape Maltings, we experimented with improvising around her music. This influenced my starting point with the opera, but I deviated considerably.

I think there are many amazing productions and recordings of her music, but what I have to add to the growing canon is the transformation of this piece into an opera for a contemporary audience. I considered the music as a dramatic force, as a strategy to draw a diverse audience who probably do not share the same spiritual culture, through calmness towards ecstasy. It is very much my lens on what a secular ecstatic ritual could be.

OperaWire: Your new opera features many different types of musical influence along with many different visual forms of performance, including dance, theatrical BSL, projections, and more, inspired by the spaces in which it’s being performed.

What was the process like to bring this all together? Did it start with the music or libretto and then build as you started working through rehearsals? What was the collaboration like to bring it all together?

NE: I have been working to incorporate British Sign Language into the piece for many years. This included doing a yearlong course to learn BSL (I’m still just a beginner!), connecting with Deaf culture, working with Deaf artists and Interpreters to build the language for the piece and to create a piece that is multisensory – so there are multiple ways to connect with meaning.

What we have created is a piece that has parallel journeys. For Deaf sign-users – there is a different journey through the piece – that is perhaps clearer. This is because BSL (to my understanding) is a clearer language than English – e.g. metaphor, simile and other poetic techniques don’t work in the same way. But image and expressiveness are inherent to the language. So there is so much to play with and inspire.

(Photo: © Claire Shovelton)

OW: Honestly, combining Hildegard’s mysticism with Afrofabulism makes a lot of sense, both moving between seen and unseen planes with roots in religion and folklore. But you reinterpreted Hildegard’s Devil as the trickster spirit Self-Loathing. What inspired that change? What does it mean to address one’s own Self-Loathing, rather than an external Devil?

NE: I felt I needed to transform her ‘Devil’ (the only male, non-singing role in her version) into ‘Self Loathing’ – perhaps a more Jungian approach to the shadow figure in the culture – with the idea that what we push down into shadow, will rise up and control us.

Audiences may come from any religions, spiritual or non-religious background, and I wanted to try and create something more neutral than the medieval catholic idea of the Devil.

I’m interested in how historically Christian missionaries while converting people around the world – would take their indigenous pantheon of spirits or gods and subsume them into the structures of Christian mythology. An obvious example in this country is Eostre (a spring goddess) becoming Easter celebrations. Or in my culture, which has a pantheon of nature spirits, plus an overarching sky god (which could be seen as similar to the Greek Zeus or the Abrahamic religions Yahweh) plus each individuals ‘personal god’ – called their ‘Chi;’ there is a horned trickster spirit called Ekwensu. The missionaries declared that he was the devil.

Turning a complex chaos bringer into a flat idea of evil. Enforcing a simple duality of good and bad. In pantheons around the world there are spirits of chaos, goddesses of destruction and renewal, trickster gods, horned gods of nature, sex and wildness which I think as well as providing rich folklore and myth, have something to teach us about human nature.

So within the libretto, I’ve written this response to the Self Loathing characters by the Virtues:

Virtues to Self Loathing:

You have no depth, no complexity, you are flat

A flat idea of negative space…

Created from a… colonial crisis of our old spirits

Our tricksters, our nature spirits, our horned gods, our graveyard hags, our moon dancers…

(Photo: © Claire Shovelton)

OperaWire: Hildegard was a visionary in more ways than one. What do you hope she would think about her life and work continuing to inspire nearly 1,000 years after her death? And what does it mean to you to bring her story on?

NE: Hildegard was fabulous. She was mythologized after her time – e.g. her letters would have been transcribed and re-transcribed and edited.

So I assume that I cannot really know her. But the figure that comes to me was so assured by her direct, clear visual and aural connection to God that I think she would not be surprised that she touches so many people today. She acted as a conduit for a beautiful vision of what humanity could be and I think that is why so many diverse groups of people are inspired by her today.