Classic 100: Composers most loved of all time.
Our ABC classical radio, a few months ago, put out a call for listeners to vote for their most loved Composer. Well you know Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and Handel will be there as Vivaldi and Elgar and Chopin will be there too.
Of course I voted for Hildegard as my No. 1 and Mahler as my 2nd most loved composer . We waited a few months for the tally and over last weekend – a National Holiday Weekend in Australia, we prepared to hang around house cooking, gardening, reading knitting , to listen to magnificent music as we counted down from 100.
Many of the great names fell all day Saturday. Their gorgeous music came lifted us and left. Composers fell away . . . Grieg, Ravel, Haydn, Wagner, Bizet and it took another sleep .
On Sunday with the count 40 and down . . . Hildegard arrived at 33. There was an eruption of excitement. There was cheering all around our apartment. . . friends were texting me and we popped the champagne ( a bit later) To think the people have taken her ecstatic, heavenly music to their hearts.
You can still hear it all on www.abc.net.au/classic – 100
To think her music was silenced by the hierarchy for nearly a year, the year before she died and now today, 900 years later she is listened to and loved by people all over the world and today in the ABC Classical Countdown of the top 100 most loved Composers of all time Hildegard rates 33rd and one of the few woman.
It is extraordinary that the voice of Hildegard has returned at this time of history with her music, her health and healing , her understanding of the environment and her call for our need to be stewards and custodians of our Mother Earth for she is our life line.
For me Hildegard is a woman who sees through hypocrisy and cannot abide with the patriarchy of church or state . She acts as if she is doesn’t see it. She acts on her intuition and what her inner voice tells her. To do this of course she had to listen and listen and listen.
Listen to the heart beat of the earth and the thrum of the tree and the wind and the messages that are with us constantly in nature and in our very being.
My story of her life written in poetic verse is with the publishers Ginninderra Press and will be launched in a few months.
And hence I am thrilled to see Hildegard of Bingen named
and for all the world ,
well for all of Australia,
(at least but I know my daughter in England was jumping up and down with joy and some Hildegardeans in America and a few in Germany were filled with joy )
to stop and listen to her exquisite music today.