memor constructs a medieval dreamscape in this concert at the Montalbâne festival.
The imagination roams wildly after dark, and its dreams are the confluence of primal fears and divine inspirations. memor’s late-night concert invites the audience into the colourful landscape of medieval dreams and visions. This collage of repertoires, from troubadour and trouvère song to sacred Latin monophony, German Spruchsang, and Trecento polyphony, offers a view of the virtuosic imagination of the medieval person, their readiness for the revelatory, and their attention to the potency of human feeling.
A Compline hymn invokes God’s protection against the phantoms of the night. The darkness teems with nightmarish figures, uncanny apparitions and disembodied voices. In a dream state, one is also sensitive to wistful remembrances and amorous fantasies. Our programme begins at the end of day, with an alluring vision of the cloaked figure of Venus and with the pinings of a woman for her lover off on a crusade. Then come foreboding and monstrous dreams: Nabuchadnezzar’s statue and Oswald von Wolkenstein’s beast, poised to trample and impale. A melody from Hildegard von Bingen sweeps in among the monsters. Hildegard reported that her music came to her in mystical revelations. The priest Guibert of Gembloux, Hildegard’s secretary and correspondent, wrote of her that, after an aural vision, “... returning to ordinary life from the melody of that internal concert, she frequently takes delight in causing those sweet modes which she learns and remembers in that spiritual harmony to reverberate with the sound of voice, and remembering God … makes words for them for the praise of God and in honor of the saints, to be sung publicly in church.” We have chosen to perform O Victoriosissimi without its text, as Hildegard herself perhaps first envisioned it.
When the nightmares pass, the dreamer remembers a faraway lady whom he is prepared to make a long pilgrimage to see. The day arrives with the star of the morning, the promise of light being the promise of salvation.