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Ave Maria, gratia plena,
Dominus tecum.
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Benedicta tu in mulieribus,
et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus.
Sancta Maria, Mater Dei,
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ora pro nobis peccatoribus
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nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.
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6
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CHARLES-FRANÇOIS GOUNOD 1818-1893 after JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH 1685-1750
arr. Mike Kenny
Ave Maria – Méditation sur le premier Prélude de piano de J.S. Bach
(Meditation on the First Piano Prelude of J.S. Bach)
Yvonne Kenny soprano, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra,
Vladimir Kamirski conductor
Attr. GIULIO CACCINI 1551-1618 arr. Dan Walker
Ave Maria
Gondwana Voices, Alexandre Oguey oboe, Helena Rathbone, Aiko Goto violins,
Nicole Forsyth viola, Daniel Yeadon cello, Maxime Bibeau double bass,
Paul Stanhope chamber organ, Lyn Williams conductor
FRANZ SCHUBERT 1797-1828
Words: Sir Walter Scott, translated D. Adam Storck
Ave Maria – Ellens Gesang III (Ellen’s Song, No. 3), D839
Lauris Elms mezzo-soprano, John Winther piano
FRANZ BIEBL 1906-2001
Ave Maria (excerpt)
Choir of Trinity College, University of Melbourne, Michael Leighton Jones director
PIETRO MASCAGNI 1863-1945
Words: Piero Mazzoni
Ave Maria (based on the Intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana)
Yvonne Kenny soprano, Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, David Stanhope conductor
JOSQUIN DES PREZ c.1450-1521
Ave Maria…virgo serena (Hail Mary…serene Virgin)
Cantillation, Brett Weymark conductor
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2’40
3’21
7’08
4’00
3’24
5’25
7
8
Attr. GIULIO CACCINI arr. Julian Yu
Ave Maria
Shu-Cheen Yu soprano, Sinfonia Australis, Antony Walker conductor
CHARLES-FRANÇOIS GOUNOD after JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
Ave Maria – Méditation sur le premier Prélude de piano de J.S. Bach
(Meditation on the First Piano Prelude of J.S. Bach)
Mario Lanza tenor, Eudice Shapiro violin, Constantine Callinicos conductor
HISTORIC MONO RECORDING
•
4’05
$
4’26
FRANZ SCHUBERT arr. Michael Hurst
Ave Maria – Ellens Gesang III (Ellen’s Song, No. 3), D839
Yvonne Kenny soprano, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Vladimir Kamirski conductor
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SERGEI RACHMANINOFF 1873-1943
Bogoroditsye Djevo, radusia (Virgin Mother of God) from All-Night Vigil (Vespers)
Sydney Philharmonia Symphonic Choir, Antony Walker conductor
3’58
ANTON BRUCKNER 1824-1896
Ave Maria
Choir of Trinity College, University of Melbourne, Michael Leighton Jones director
4’14
^
FRANZ SCHUBERT arr. August Wilhelmj
Ave Maria – Ellens Gesang III (Ellen’s Song, No. 3), D839
Jascha Heifetz violin, Emanuel Bay piano
5’24
HISTORIC MONO RECORDING
•
RECORDED 19 OCTOBER 1946
2’47
Total Playing Time
LIVE RECORDING
!
@
£
Attr. GIULIO CACCINI arr. Julie Simonds
Ave Maria
David Stanhope piano
4’40
LUIGI CHERUBINI 1760-1842
Ave Maria
Shu-Cheen Yu soprano, Alexa Murray cor anglais, The Queensland Orchestra,
Brett Kelly conductor
ROBERT PARSONS c.1530-1570
Ave Maria
Cantillation, Antony Walker conductor
4’23
4’39
4
8’46
%
RECORDED 11 MAY 1950
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HENRYK MIKOŁAJ GÓRECKI b.1933
Words: Helena Wanda Błażusiakówna (inscribed on a cell wall in a Gestapo prison)
Mamo, nie płacz, nie (Mama, don’t cry, no): Second movement (Lento e largo)
of Symphony No. 3, Op. 36 ‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’
Yvonne Kenny soprano, Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Takuo Yuasa conductor
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73’20
enthusiasms for a feminised divinity.
Furthermore, the lack of detailed scriptural
information about her also meant that the
worship of Mary concentrated on the more
accessible mediums of image, poetry and
music. She became, in effect, the people’s saint,
and by medieval times was commonly invoked
as the mediator between Christ and the believer.
Blending theological orthodoxy with popular
piety, the Ave Maria soon had a place of
prominence in the liturgy of the Catholic Church.
Ave Maria, gratia plena,
Dominus tecum.
Benedicta tu in mulieribus,
et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus.
Sancta Maria, Mater Dei,
ora pro nobis peccatoribus
nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.
Hail Mary, full of grace,
the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women,
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us sinners
now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
By the early Renaissance, a considerable corpus
of polyphonic settings of the Ave Maria had
been composed, although the text itself had not
yet been standardised. A setting by the FrancoFlemish composer Josquin des Prez is perhaps
his best-known work today. Since its publication
in 1502 it has stood as an exemplar of his
mature style, demonstrating the qualities of
vocal purity and compositional logic that came
to characterise the glorious century of
polyphonic church music that was to follow him.
In this respect, the emergence of Josquin’s
music to prominence was a musical
development comparable in significance to
Haydn’s ‘invention’ of the string quartet two and
a half centuries later. The work was most likely
composed for Josquin’s patron, Cardinal Ascanio
Sforza, to accompany him as he undertook a
pilgrimage to the shrine to the Virgin Mary in
Loreto around 1480.
The origins of the Ave Maria, a hymn of praise to
the mother of Christ, are unclear but appear to
date back at least as far as the early sixth
century. An early form of the text we know
today appears in a liturgy associated with
Severus, Patriarch of Antioch (c.513), as well as
several of his contemporaries. These in turn
were inspired by the words of commendation of
the Archangel Gabriel and Elizabeth found in the
first chapter of the Gospel according to St Luke.
The Bible otherwise tells us little about Mary,
nevertheless it is clear from the inscriptions and
images left on the graves of the early Christians
that Marian devotion is as old as Christian
worship itself. The elevation of Mary to a pride
of place in the liturgy of the early church no
doubt helped it assimilate lingering pagan
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the words of the text over a harmonised bass.
This new style later developed into recitative
and aria, the fundamental musical building
blocks of opera. Caccini’s aim was, as he put it,
to ‘move the affect of the soul’, and reflected
wider cultural and intellectual currents that we
have come to describe today as Renaissance
‘humanism’. The setting of the Ave Maria that is
commonly attributed to him, however, bears
only a loose resemblance to his style, and is in
fact believed to be by Vladimir Vavilov (19251973), a Russian guitarist, lutenist and composer
who composed it as a ‘fake’ after the manner of
Fritz Kreisler’s similarly good-natured frauds.
Alas, Vavilov died in poverty, never to know just
how famous this illegitimate creation would
soon become.
By the middle of the 16th century, however,
much of Western Europe was in religious turmoil
and this had a profound effect on the role of the
church and church music in European society. In
countries where Protestantism flourished, the
tradition of Marian icons and hymns in praise of
the Virgin came abruptly to an end. In England,
however, the effects of the Reformation were
less decisive, a reflection of the uncertain course
of the English Reformation itself. We known very
little about Robert Parsons beyond that he was
a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal during the reign
of Queen Mary, who had tried to re-establish
Catholicism in England after Henry VIII’s break
with Rome. The survival of Parsons’ music under
Mary’s successor, her Protestant sister Elizabeth,
may have been aided in part because the
preservation of such outwardly ‘Catholic’ music
helped to reassure both her subjects and her
allies abroad as to her religious moderation. But
Elizabeth had also come to style herself as the
‘Virgin Queen’, and composers for the Chapel
Royal could also flatter her in this way with thinly
veiled allegories.
By the late 18th century, church music had been
eclipsed altogether by secular forms of music
making, a reflection more generally of the
weakening of church patronage and growing
secularisation in the age of Enlightenment. By
the middle of the 19th century, however, many
musicians and critics from outside the church
started to express renewed interested in
religious music, and the Marian tradition in
particular. Reflecting upon the social and cultural
effects of the French Revolution and
industrialisation, many Romantic artists saw in
the culture and religious practices of an earlier
age an authenticity they thought otherwise
lacking in modern society. The renewal of
Like Josquin before him, Giulio Caccini has
become renowned for heralding a new musical
epoch. His most famous work is Le nuove
musiche (‘The New Music’), a collection of solo
songs with basso continuo, prefaced with a
polemical essay in support of the new style of
music therein. Gone was the polyphonic writing
of the previous century; now a solo voice sang
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execution of King Louis XVI of France; like the
religious music of Mozart and Schubert, it
demonstrates the extent to which popular
operatic musical styles had come to inform
music composed for the Church.
interest in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach
was one notable result of this historicism,
marked famously by the first modern
performance of the St Matthew Passion in 1829.
Charles-François Gounod’s setting of the Ave
Maria was therefore perhaps a doubly attractive
work, both as a modern setting of the ancient
hymn, and as a ‘mischievous’ improvisation over
the first prelude from Book One of Bach’s Das
wohltemperirte Clavier (The Well-Tempered
Clavier). First composed as an instrumental
duet, Gounod later adapted verses by Lamartine
(‘Vers sur un album’) to the descant melody,
scoring it for violin solo and homophonic chorus.
It was only in 1859 that he arrived at the setting
we know today. Gounod is now known
principally for two works – this Ave Maria and
his opera Faust – but was one of the most
respected and prolific composers in France
during the second half of the 19th century.
Historicism also helps explains Schubert’s
interest in the poems of the Scottish poet Sir
Walter Scott. By the 1820s Scott was famous
across Europe for historical novels such as Rob
Roy, Ivanhoe and The Bride of Lammermoor
(later to form the basis of the libretto to
Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor). The text for
Schubert’s famous Ave Maria is drawn from
Scott’s Lady of the Lake (1810), a verse epic set
in Perthshire and loosely based around the
conflict between King James V of Scotland and
Highland clans. This particular hymn to Mary is
spoken in Canto III by Ellen, the daughter of the
outlawed Lord James of Douglas, as an appeal
for the safe deliverance of herself and her father
in the impending battle between the Highlanders
and King James. From its first performance
Schubert’s setting was recognised as a
masterpiece. Its sweeping lyricism could easily
have come from the hand of Bellini or Donizetti,
and illustrates the fact that it was Schubert, and
not Beethoven, who best anticipated the
Romantic musical style as it was actually to be
practised, with its emphasis on melody itself as
a vehicle for poetic musical expression, and its
exploration of unusual harmonic relationships.
Schubert was also an early master of the piano
An Italian by birth, Luigi Cherubini, like Gounod,
first found fame as an opera composer in Paris;
by far the best-known of his works today is
Médée (Medea, 1797). His setting of the Ave
Maria, however, dates from 1816 when,
disappointed with his recent lack of success in
the theatre, he accepted an appointment as
Superintendent of the royal chapel of Louis XVIII.
For the next few years he composed almost
exclusively church music. This Ave Maria dates
from the same year as his Requiem in C minor
which commemorated the anniversary of the
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accompaniment, and the evocative, harp-like,
effect in this particular song has proven
irresistible to arrangers ever since.
that it is intended first and foremost for liturgical
use and not for the concert hall, reflecting both
his profound Catholic faith, and his long career
as organist of the Augustinian monastery in
St Florian and later at the Cathedral in Linz. This
setting of the Ave Maria was composed for the
Linz Cathedral Choir in 1861. Today Bruckner is
best known for his symphonies, which,
according to Deryck Cooke, ‘express the most
fundamental human impulses, unalloyed by
civilized conditioning, with an extraordinary
purity and grandeur of expression…they are on a
monumental scale which, despite many internal
subtleties and complexities, has a shattering
simplicity of outline.’ That this description also
holds true for his religious music points to the
underlying strength of conviction inspiring a
composer who is otherwise often remembered
for his painful humility in the face of criticism.
Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana (1890) is
a representative of another kind of 19th-century
yearning for authenticity. Here, the subject
matter is drawn not from an idealised past, but
rather an idealised rural present. Like so many of
his contemporaries, Mascagni found rural Italy
(and especially rural Sicily) a compelling
backdrop for a drama that was to be concerned
with the depiction of heightened emotion. The
famous Intermezzo, an instrumental interlude
that occurs mid-way through the opera, was
later adapted to accompany an interpolated
setting of the Ave Maria; there are English
words by F.E. Weatherly (author of ‘Danny Boy’),
but it is the Italian version by Pietro Mazzoni that
is recorded here. This kind of reworking might
seem rather tasteless to modern sensibilities,
but was in fact a common practice in the late
19th century. The survival of this Ave Maria as a
repertoire piece suggests the extent to which it
was, in this instance, also a musically and
dramatically apt appropriation. The Intermezzo,
after all, is the ‘eye in the storm’ of the opera, to
be performed according to the composer’s
instructions ‘with the curtain up on an empty
stage’. What better way to think of this music
than as a prayer of intercession?
Sergei Rachmaninoff’s relationship to organised
religion, and to the Russian Orthodox Church
in particular, was more typical of the age, being
something he practised much more in spirit than
to the letter. ‘Bogoroditsye Djevo, radusia’
(Virgin Mother of God) is taken from his All-Night
Vigil (1915) where Rachmaninoff drew upon
authentic Russian chants and what he described
as his own ‘conscious counterfeit of the original’.
He also remained true to the Russian tradition
of unaccompanied choral music. The All-Night
Vigil, however, was to be his last sacred
music composition.
Anton Bruckner’s religious music stands out
from that of his more famous contemporaries in
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inscriptions crying for justice, help or revenge,
the composer had been struck by words left by
an 18-year-old girl who, instead of dwelling upon
her own fate or thoughts of revenge, had
thought of her mother. It was her mother, she
knew, who would experience the cruellest
despair as a result of her suffering. Here the
praise of Mary invokes her other principal
manifestation in Christianity, that of the Mater
Dolorosa, the woman who not only intercedes
for us, but suffers with us.
Although of course not nearly as well known,
Franz Biebl shares with Anton Bruckner the fact
that for most of his life he was an active church
musician, and a good deal of his impressive
compositional output was for practical liturgical
use. His Ave Maria was composed in 1964 but
only became widely known in the mid 1990s
after it was recorded by the US-based choir
Chanticleer. Characteristic of Biebl’s
unashamedly personable composition style, it
was originally scored for men only, reflecting the
fact that it has its origin in a commission from
his local firemen’s choir!
Peter Tregear
Dr Peter Tregear is the Dean of Trinity College,
University of Melbourne. A graduate of King’s
College, Cambridge, and before that, the
University of Melbourne, he has worked
extensively as an academic, teacher, and
performer in music and music theatre, and has
conducted youth orchestras in Australia and
England. His published works include articles for
Cambridge Opera Journal, Renaissance and
Modern Studies, Times Literary Supplement, The
Literary Review, Österreichische Musikzeitschrift,
Beethoven Forum, and the Oxford Companion to
Australian Music, and he has recently completed
a major study of the Austrian composer Ernst
Krenek, to be published by Scarecrow Press.
Recent research interests include the reception
of classical music in America after 9/11.
Henryk Mikołaj Górecki came to prominence in
his native Poland initially as a leading member of
a young musical avant-garde. He remained
relatively unknown outside his homeland until
the 1990s when a commercial recording of his
Third Symphony (1976) became a worldwide
popular success. Like Biebl, Górecki had arrived
at a compositional voice which was both utterly
sincere and accessible. Drawing on a variety of
musical influences, including American
minimalism, 19th-century classical music, Polish
hymnody and folksong, the Symphony seems to
resonate with a contemporary desire to reaffirm
the power of quiet prayer in an especially
ruthless and frantic age. The text of the second
movement, which ends with the lines ‘Hail Mary,
you are full of grace’, is taken from a graffito
inscribed on the wall of a Gestapo prison in
Zakopane. Casting his eyes over a tangle of
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ABC Classics thanks Alexandra Alewood and
Melissa Kennedy.
 1993 1, 1995 3, 1996 9, 1999 5, 2000 0, 2001
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2007 8, ^ Australian Broadcasting Corporation
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Australian Broadcasting Corporation. © 2007 Australian
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