Saint

Opera has housed a long and curious fetish for the convent. Around a century ago, composers couldn’t get enough of lustful, visionary nuns. Although relatively tame next to what was to follow, Puccini’s 1918 “Suor Angelica” revealed a convent where worldly and spiritual desires collide.

But Hindemith’s “Sancta Susanna,” with its startling love affair between a nun and her maid servant, titillated German audiences at the start of the roaring twenties, and still can. A sexually and violently explicit production in Stuttgart last year led to 18 freaked-out audience members requiring medical attention — and sold-out houses.

Los Angeles Opera got in the act early on. A daring production of Prokofiev’s 1927 “The Fiery Angel,” one of the operas that opened the company’s second season in 1967, saw, wrote Times music critic Martin Bernheimer, “hysterical nuns tear off their sacred habits as they writhe climactically in topless demonic frenzy.”

Now we have, as a counterbalance to a lurid male gaze as the season’s new opera for L.A. Opera’s 40th anniversary season, Sarah Kirkland Snider’s sincere 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 on Wednesday night, is the latest in L.A. Opera’s ongoing collaboration with Beth Morrison Projects, which commissioned the work.

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 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 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, staring 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.

Snider, who also wrote the libretto, focuses her two-and-a-half-hour opera, however, on but a crucial year in Hildegard’s long life (she is thought to have lived to 82 or 83). A mother superior in her 40s, she has found a young acolyte, Richardis, deeply devoted to her and who paints representations of Hildegard’s visions. Those visions, as unheard-of divine communion with a woman, draw her into conflict with priests who find them false. But she goes over the head of her adversarial abbot, Cuno, and convinces the Pope that her visions are the voice of God.

Mikaela Bennett, left, as Richardis von Stade and Nola Richardson as Hildegard von Bingen during a dress rehearsal of “Hildegard.”

(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)

Hildegard, as some musicologists have proposed, may have developed a romantic attachment to the young Richardis, and Kirkland turns this into a spiritual crisis for both women. A co-crisis presents itself in Hildegard’s battles with Cuno, who punishes her by forbidding her to make music, which she ignores.

What of music? Along with being convent opera, “Hildegard” joins a lesser-known peculiar genre of operas about composers that include Todd Machover’s “Schoenberg in Hollywood,” given by UCLA earlier this year, and Louis Andriessen’s perverse masterpiece about a fictional composer, “Rosa.” In these, one composer’s music somehow conveys the presence and character of another composer.

Snider follows that intriguing path. “Hildegard” is scored for a nine-member chamber ensemble — string quartet, bass, harp, flute, clarinet and bassoon — which are members of the L.A. Opera Orchestra. Gabriel Crouch, who serves as music director, is a longtime member of the early music community as singer and conductor. But the allusions to Hildegard’s music remain modest.

Instead, each short scene (there are nine in the first act and five — along with entr’acte and epilogue — in the second), is set with a short instrumental opening. That may be a rhythmic, Steve Reich-like rhythmic pattern or a short melodic motif that is varied throughout the scene. Each creates a sense of movement.

Hildegard’s vocal writing was characterized by effusive melodic lines, a style out-of-character with the more restrained chant of the time. Snider’s vocal lines can feel, however, more conversational and more suited to narrative outline. Characters are introduced and only gradually given personality (we don’t get much of a sense of Richardis until the second act). Even Hildegard’s visions are more implied than revealed.

Under it all, though, is an alluring intricacy in the instrumental ensemble. Still with the help of a couple angels in short choral passages, a lushness creeps in.

The second act is where the relationship between Hildegard and Richardis blossoms and with it, musically, the arrival of rapture and onset of an ecstasy more overpowering than Godly visions. In the end, the opera, like the saint, requires patience. The arresting arrival of spiritual transformation arrives in the epilogue.

Snider has assembled a fine cast. Outwardly, soprano Nola Richardson can seem a coolly proficient Hildegard, the efficient manager of a convent and her sisters. Yet once divulged, her radiant inner life colors every utterance. Mikaela Bennett’s Richardis contrasts with her darker, powerful, dramatic soprano. Their duets are spine-tingling.

Tenor Roy Hage is the amiable Volmar, Hildegard’s confidant in the monastery and baritone David Adam Moore her tormentor abbot. The small roles of monks, angels and the like are thrilling voices all.

Set design (Marsha Ginsberg), light-show projection design (Deborah Johnson), scenic design, which includes small churchly models (Marsha Ginsberg), and various other designers all function to create a concentrated space for music and movement.

All but one. Beth Morrison Projects, L.A. Opera’s invaluable source for progressive and unexpected new work, tends to go in for blatant amplification. The Herculean task of singing five performances and a dress rehearsal of this demanding opera over six days could easily result in mass vocal destruction without the aid of microphones.

But the intensity of the sound adds a crudeness to the instrumental ensemble, which can be all harp or ear-shatter clarinet, and reduces the individuality of singers’ voices. There is little quiet in what is supposed to be a quiet place, where silence is practiced.

Maybe that’s the point. We amplify 21st century worldly and spiritual conflict, not going gentle into that, or any, good night.

‘Hildegard’

Where: The Wallis, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills

When: Through Nov. 9

Tickets: Performances sold out, but check for returns

Info: (213) 972-8001, laopera.org

Running time: About 2 hours and 50 minutes (one intermission)

Rock band Oasis, who Hatton adored and would later befriend, were building on Manchester’s reputation as a capital of the music world.

Manchester United were dominating English football.

Hatton was playing his part in the ring and also giving his Manchester City-supporting backers something to cheer while their team struggled in the Red Devils’ shadow.

In the city centre, a new venue opened and staged a Torvill and Dean performance on its opening night.

“It was fortunate that they built the Manchester Arena when they did,” said Speak of the indoor venue that welcomed its first customers in 1995.

This is where Hatton had 15 of his professional fights. “It would become his fortress,” Speak said.

By the time Hatton fought Kostya Tszyu in 2005, he was selling out the arena.

Hatton stopped the man who was regarded as the world’s best light-welterweight to win the IBF title.

Danny Jackson, a close friend to Hatton and Manchester City’s matchday announcer, delivered an emotional speech in memory of his pal at the recent City-United derby.

He gives Hatton credit for putting his beloved football club – now giants of the world game – in the spotlight.

“You look at Rick’s time as a boxer, there wasn’t a lot to like about City then,” Jackson said.

“Rick was a bit of a shining light in that period. He got City’s brand out there to millions of people.”

Retired world champion Anthony Crolla described the Tszyu fight as “one of the greatest nights Manchester has ever had in any sport”.

The next day, Hatton set up camp at the New Inn in Hyde for what had become a regular celebration – nicknamed the not-so-nice shirt nights.

“He didn’t want to swan off to celebrity hotspots; he wanted to be around his mates and having a laugh,” said Jackson.

Paul Smith, the Liverpool world title challenger who trained alongside Hatton, remembers one fancy dress party when Hatton dressed as ‘Ginger Spice’ Geri Halliwell.

Those kind of images would get out and help to keep Hatton in the hearts of those from Manchester, because they could see he was one of them.

That never changed. This summer, Hatton attended a friend’s stag do in Portugal.

They set him up by giving him dissolvable swimming shorts to wear in the pool.

“There were a group of lads there from Leeds by the pool idolising him and they were saying ‘I can’t believe you’re doing this to a superstar’,” said Jackson.

“He took the stick, he gave the stick, just a normal guy.”

Carlo Acutis, a digital pioneer, used his computer skills to spread Catholic teaching globally.

A London-born Italian teenager, known as “God’s influencer”, who was an early adopter of the internet to spread Catholic teachings, has been made the church’s first millennial saint at a ceremony led by Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican.

Leo canonised Carlo Acutis, who died in 2006 aged 15, in a ceremony attended by thousands on Sunday in St Peter’s Square. At the Mass, the pontiff also canonised Pier Giorgio Frassati, who died in 1924 but was widely recognised for his charitable work.

During a speech at the event, Leo credited Acutis and Frassati for making “masterpieces” out of their lives, warning congregants that the “greatest risk in life is to waste it outside of God’s plan”.

Often seen photographed in his casual outfits, with scruffy hair, T-shirts and sunglasses, Acutis cuts a different figure from the church’s saints of the past who were often depicted in solemn paintings. This has built a global following for Acutis, with the church intending him to be a more relatable saint for digitally-focused young people today.

Leo said Acutis and Frassati’s lives are an “invitation to all of us, especially young people, not to squander our lives, but to direct them upwards and make them masterpieces”.

Acutis was born in London in 1991 but moved early on in his life to the northern Italian city of Milan with his family, where he lived until he died of leukaemia in 2006.

As a teenager, Acutis taught himself coding and programming, using the skills he had acquired to document recognised church miracles to spread Catholic teaching globally. His pioneering digital efforts took place at a time when literacy around those subjects was not widespread.

He was also believed to have regularly attended church services, been kind to the homeless and children who suffered bullying, which endeared him to Catholic youth globally.

Shortly after he died, Antonia Salzano, Acutis’s mother, began advocating globally for her son to be recognised as a saint, which requires that he carry out miracles during his life.

Pope Francis, whose death in April this year led to a delay in the saint-making ceremony for Acutis, said the teenager carried out two miracles during his life. According to the Catholic News Agency, Acutis healed a boy who had a birth defect affecting his pancreas and a girl who sustained an injury in Costa Rica.

In a 2019 letter to Catholics, Pope Francis acknowledged Acutis’s efforts, saying, “It is true that the digital world can expose you to the risk of self-absorption, isolation and empty pleasure.” He added, “But don’t forget that there are young people even there who show creativity and even genius. That was the case with the Venerable Carlo Acutis.”

Acutis’s body, encased in wax, lies in a glass tomb in Assisi, a medieval town in central Italy, which is a pilgrimage site visited by hundreds of thousands of people annually. Our Lady of Dolours Church in London, where he was baptised, has also attracted growing numbers of visitors. A part of his heart has been removed from his body as a relic and has been displayed at churches globally.