The Earliest Play Set to Music

Hildegard of Bingen composed Ordo Virtutum, the Order of the Virtues, around 1151, during the years she was relocating her community from the Disibodenberg to a new monastery she founded at Rupertsberg near Bingen. It survives complete in the same manuscript as her larger song collection, the Symphonia, with both text and music attributed to her, a double attribution no other surviving medieval drama can claim. The play is built as an allegorical contest for a single human soul, Anima, who abandons the seventeen Virtues, personified and each given her own melodic voice, for worldly pleasure before the Devil claims her, and is won back through the Virtues' intervention led by Humility. Historians of medieval drama call it the earliest morality play by more than a century, predating the genre's better known fifteenth century examples, and some musicologists have described it as the earliest surviving music drama with a plausible claim to the label opera, though that comparison is anachronistic and contested rather than settled. Scholarship on its first performance is not fully settled either: it may have marked the 1152 dedication of the new abbey church at Rupertsberg, or a ceremony consecrating new nuns into Hildegard's community, and the surviving evidence supports either occasion without confirming one over the other.