This month I'm doing a special series of Thursday Classical Music diaries focused on female composers. Last week, I explored the music of Lili and Nadia Boulanger. This week, we're setting the Way-Back to explore the music of one of the Greatest Women of All Time,
St. Hildegard von Bingen.
The term Polymath is usually used to describe the great men of the Renaissance--Leonardo Da Vinci, for instance. However, over four hundred years before the Renaissance, Hildegard was universally recognized as such. Here are a few of her labels:
Composer, Poet, Visionary, Theologian, Healer, Scientist, Philosopher, Mystic, Abbess, Preacher, Writer, Linguist, and finally Doctor of the Church.