"O Verbum Patris": un canto senza notazioni neumatiche di Hildegard von Bingen

The essay deals with the song O Verbum Patris composed by Hildegard von Bingen. This song is not inserted in her lyrical cycle called Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum and has no neums’ notation in its manuscript tradition. The song’s critical text is preceded by a discussion of its main ecdotic problems and followed by an original translation in Italian; it is provided also with an analytical guide to its interpretation and with a continuous and exhaustive commentary, that includes remarks on its main structural, rhetorical, linguistic and hypotextual factors. The guide to the interpretation of the song and the commentary on its text are both necessary to a first reliable approach to the complex stratification of the meanings of Hildegard’s poetry, that makes a very ample use of symbols, tropes and references to biblical and patristic tradition. Hildegard’s mystical imagination seems to be an encoding instrument for a very complex communication system disposed on manifold levels of meaning.