Ave Maria (Hymn)

Held here as a hymn, the Ave Maria is the Angelic Salutation, the greeting of the angel Gabriel to Mary at the Annunciation, joined to the words of Elizabeth and to a later petition, which has been set to music countless times and is among the most frequently composed texts in the Western choral tradition. Its scriptural core is drawn from the Gospel of Luke, and to the salutation the church added the prayer asking Mary to intercede for sinners, the whole reaching its settled form in the sixteenth century. As a sung text it has inspired settings from medieval plainchant and Renaissance polyphony to the famous nineteenth-century melodies, so that the same words serve both as the repeated prayer of the rosary and as a centrepiece of sacred music. The hymn expresses the Catholic and Orthodox honouring of Mary as the mother of Christ who prays for the faithful, and its musical settings have carried the words far beyond the bounds of formal devotion into the wider culture.

Its liturgical form, ending with the petition to pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, only reached general fixed use after the Council of Trent, and the prayer's dual timeframe, asking for intercession both in ordinary life and at the moment of death, has shaped how composers approach it musically, often shifting from serene melody at the opening greeting to a more solemn register at its close. Among the countless musical settings, those by Renaissance composers written for unaccompanied choir remain the most widely performed in liturgical contexts, while later Romantic settings are more often heard in concert than in church.

As a hymn text rather than only a repeated devotional formula, Ave Maria has drawn an unusually large body of independent musical composition, and the most famous example is also among the most commonly misunderstood: Franz Schubert's Ave Maria, one of the best known pieces of music associated with the prayer, was originally composed in 1825 as a setting of a German poem, Ellens dritter Gesang, a character's song from a German translation of Walter Scott's narrative poem The Lady of the Lake, and had nothing to do with the Latin Ave Maria text at that point. Only later did performers and publishers begin fitting the Latin prayer's words to Schubert's melody in place of the original German, a substitution so successful and so widely repeated in recordings and concerts that the piece is now overwhelmingly known and performed as a setting of the Latin prayer despite its entirely separate original text and occasion.

A second widely performed setting, Charles Gounod's Ave Maria of 1859, was built by composing a melody over the harmonic structure of an existing keyboard piece, the first prelude of Johann Sebastian Bach's Well Tempered Clavier, added onto that pre existing accompaniment rather than composed as an independent piece from scratch, another instance of the prayer's musical history being considerably more layered and composite than a listener encountering only the finished, familiar result would likely assume. Both cases illustrate how thoroughly the prayer's musical reception has been shaped by adaptation and reuse of existing material rather than by original composition written for the Latin text alone.