'Hildegard' spends a year in mystic's life

['Hildegard,' from E1] and compelling “Hildegard,” based on a real-life 12th century abbess and present-day cult figure, St. Hildegard von Bingen. The opera, which had its premiere at the Wallis last week, is the latest in L.A. Opera’s ongoing collaboration with Beth Morrison Projects, which commissioned the work.

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MIKAELA BENNETT, left, as Richardis and Nola Richardson as Hildegard kiss. RICHARDSON performs alongside David Adam Moore, who plays Abbot Cuno.

(Photographs by CARLIN STIEHL For The Times)

Elkhanah Pulitzer’s production is decorous and spare. Snider’s slow, elegantly understated and, within bounds, reverential opera operates as much as a passion play as an opera. Its concerns and desires are our 21st century concerns and desires, with Hildegard beheld as a proto-feminist icon. Its characters and music so easily traverse a millennium’s distance that the High Middle Ages might as well be the day before yesterday.

Hildegard is best known for the music she produced in her Rhineland German monastery and for the transcriptions of her luminous visions. But she has also attracted a cult-like following as healer with an extensive knowledge of herbal remedies some still apply as alternative medicine to this day, as she has for her remarkable success in challenging the patriarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.

She has further reached broad audiences through Oliver Sacks’ book, “Migraine,” in which the widely read neurologist proposed that Hildegard’s visions were a result of her headaches. Those visions, themselves, have attained classic status. Recordings of her music are plentiful. “Lux Vivens,” produced by David Lynch and featuring Scottish fiddle player Jocelyn Montgomery, must be the first to put a saint's songs on the popular culture map.

Margarethe von Trotta made an effective biopic of Hildegard, starring the intense singer Barbara Sukowa. An essential biography, “The Woman of Her Age” by Fiona Maddocks, followed Hildegard’s canonization by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012.