Composer Sarah Kirkland Snider loves music so much, she might just eat it

toggle caption Anja Schutz

Any composer's relationship to music is intense, but Sarah Kirkland Snider, whose debut opera, Hildegard, receives its world premiere at the LA Opera this week, ratchets that intensity up to a higher, more metaphysical level. When Snider hears music, she says, she sometimes wants to eat it — that's how deep the desire goes. She's not traditionally religious, but she has come to see music as a mysterious, divine force within her.

That force has been gaining strength ever since the 52-year-old's breakthrough piece, Penelope, appeared 15 years ago. The song cycle tells the story of a psychologically damaged husband returning from war to a wife who tries to help him find himself again. The piece resonates in Snider's own life, as she's been open about her own struggles with depression and anxiety.

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The Princeton, N.J., native has had to overcome more than just mental health challenges — her career, still on the rise, has been rife with roadblocks. One of the most significant dates back to her years in post-grad study at the Yale School of Music, where she sometimes felt creatively straitjacketed. She didn't write a note for the first six months she was there, afraid of breaking any of the academically sanctioned rules about what good music should sound like.

Finding her own compositional voice wasn't easy, but the warm critical response to Penelope helped validate her singular language — one that organically incorporates elements of classical, rock and pop, a blend she once felt ashamed to indulge. One of Snider's greatest assets is her natural facility in writing vocal music; she followed Penelope with another song cycle, Unremembered (2015), and the choral work Mass for the Endangered (2020), which married environmentalism with the traditional Latin requiem mass.

Given the hurdles she's surmounted and her success so far, it's not a shock to learn that the subject of Snider's new opera is Hildegard von Bingen — the 12th century German abbess who, against all odds, became a prolific composer, writer, scientist, philosopher and diplomat. Snider says that what Hildegard accomplished in her time, especially as a woman, is a never-ending source of inspiration.

From her home in Princeton — where she lives with her husband, the composer Steven Mackey, and their children — Snider joined a video chat to talk about Hildegard, how her health intersects with her work, and the genesis of New Amsterdam, the influential record label she co-founded.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tom Huizenga: In your upcoming opera about the medieval abbess Hildegard von Bingen, there's a scene where celestial voices tell Hildegard, "Know thyself, find your strength." It made me pause and think: Those words could probably serve as your own personal motto.

Sarah Kirkland Snider: You get at the heart of one of the reasons I became so interested in Hildegard. In my early readings about her, one of the pervasive themes of her life was self-doubt and anxiety, and that's certainly been true for me, too. I think that's true for a lot of people.

Just speaking for myself, as a woman who was raised by conservative Southern traditional parents to be a certain kind of girl — that meant pleasing others, downplaying my own needs, not sharing my own point of view. My parents meant well; it was the way they were raised. For women like me, who've had that experience, it certainly can be daunting to try to assert oneself in the world, artistically or personally. And when you're an artist, you have to constantly assert yourself. You have to put your artistic point of view forward and believe in it, and all of that can be very daunting.