LUMEN HILARE

This piece was written by St. Hildegaard,  O.S.B. (German: Hildegard von Bingen; Latin: Hildegardis Bingensis; 1098 – 17 September 1179), also known as Hildegaard of Bingen and Sibyl of the Rhine, was a German Benedictine abbess, writer, composer, philosopher, Christian mystic, visionary, and polymath. she founded the monasteries of Rupertsberg in 1150 and Eibingen in 1165. One of her works as a composer, the Ordo Virtutum, is an early example of liturgical drama and arguably the oldest surviving morality play. She wrote theological, botanical, and medicinal texts, as well as letters, liturgical songs, and poems, while supervising miniature illuminations in the Rupertsberg manuscript of her first work, Scivias. She is also noted for the invention of a constructed language known as Lingua Ignota.  Pope Benedict XVI named her a Doctor of the Church.

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Her music represents one of the largest surviving repertoires among medieval composers. The majority of her liturgical music utilizes her own poetic text. With this piece however, she set the Kyrie of the Mass to music. Her chant style is characterized by soaring melodies that can push the boundaries of  traditional Gregorian chantof the time. Though Hildegard's music is often thought to stand outside the normal practices of monophonic monastic chant, current researchers are also exploring ways in which it may be viewed in comparison with her contemporaries, such as Hermannus Contractus. Another feature of Hildegard's music that both reflects twelfth-century evolutions of chant and pushes those evolutions further is that it is highly melismatic, often with recurrent melodic units. Scholars also note the intimate relationship between music and text in Hildegard's compositions, whose rhetorical features are often more distinct than is common in twelfth-century chant.

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In Rome, the sacred Liturgy was first celebrated in Greek. At some point the Roman Mass was translated into Latin, but the historical record on this process is sparse. The Kyrie in the Roman Mass is best seen as a vestige of a litany prayed at the beginning of the Mass. The prayer, "Kyrie, eleison," "Lord, have mercy" derives from several New Testament verses as various blind men and the Caananite woman cry out to Jesus for mercy.