Prologue: The Angel
An Angel stands in the audience, watching a collage of images of human history. He sings the words of Walter Benjamin: “This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees a single catastrophe...” Two women emerge from this pageant of the dead: Eleanor, Queen of the English, and Hildegard, Abbess of Rupertsburg, once the two most powerful women in Europe.

Scene 1: A Wall Battered by a Storm
Through the Angel’s eyes, we are returned to the 1160s. Eleanor visits Hildegard in Rupertsburg, seeking her advice about the crisis in her marriage to Henry II. Hildegard responds with words from her surviving letter to Eleanor, advising her to seek peace.

Scene 2: Tribulations
Eleanor struggles with this advice. Is it so wrong to be ambitious, to revel in human life and change? God sees the folly of human striving, Hildegard replies. Eleanor taunts Hildegard with the joys of sex and children, Hildegard cries out that nothing compares to spiritual bliss.

Scene 3: Vision
As the women reach the height of their argument, the Angel appears and sings to both. They are terrified, enraptured. Each one sings what she hears/sees/feels. The Angel kisses each woman on the lips, and goes.

Scene 4: Flee This and Attain Stability
In the space left by the Angel, the two women confess the emptiness they have always felt when passion departs. They acknowledge that their fierce desire for something better transcends the differences that divide them.

Epilogue: The Storm
The Angel reappears in the audience. He begins to watch history again, flickering over the faces of Eleanor and Hildegard. The three sing together of human longing and the possibility of transcendence.