Some of my most beautiful childhood memories are the times spent praying with my Grandmother. We prayed together often and she was the first to teach me the many prayers, including the “Hail Mary.” She still to this day has a profound and passionate devotion to our Blessed Mother, often praying the Rosary at least once a day, if not more. Always in her hand is a pair of glass-looking rosary beads with a huge silver cross that I admired as a child and she often kept and still does keep the beads in plain view, on the coffee table or on the nightstand next to her bed. She also loved to sing, and though we never sang the Rosary together, she would be happy to know that there are musical settings of the prayer that do exist. When I began to study singing, I was filled with joy to learn settings of the Ave Maria, the “Hail Mary” set to music. In this month of October, a month dedicated to the Rosary and our Blessed Mother, let us take a look over the next two weeks at some musical settings of both the Rosary and the Ave Maria, and see how different composers captured our Lady in song.
Ms. Andrea Covais, OLMC Music Director
The Rosary is often spoken but it has within the prayers a rhythm and flow that can easily be sung as chant. Modern liturgical composer Bob Hurd has designed and recorded on CD a Rosary that one can chant called “A Contemplative Rosary”. The beautiful and easy to remember melodies are a lovely way to pray each of the mysteries of the Rosary and the prayers. The CD also contains gathering and recessional songs and can be a wonderful tool for small group recitation. It is available on CD from Oregon Catholic Press. The Dominican Sisters of Mary also have a CD entitled “The Rosary” which features songs and spoken prayers, and the Sisters’ original meditations to their own sacred music. The beauty of their singing will move you for sure.
As a part of the Rosary, the “Hail Mary” is repeated the most of any prayer and composers over the centuries have created beautiful melodies from this text. Beginning with chant in the early centuries, we do not know exactly who wrote these melodies. They were often passed down orally, usually sung at monasteries and convents and then probably written down years later, when musical notation was learned and more widespread. The most famous melody, known as Chant Mode I (sung at Communion time this weekend) later found its way into an Ave Maria by Tomas Luis de Victoria, sixteenth-century Spanish composer and Catholic priest. Victoria is best known for his work O Magnum Mysterium, often sung at Christmas.
Another interesting setting of the Ave Maria is attributed to sixteenth-century composer Guilio Caccini, though recent scholarship has come to believe that this piece may have been actually written almost four hundred years later by relatively unknown Soviet composer Vladimir Vavilov. Vavilov was Roman Catholic and had a great devotion to the Blessed Mother and it is believed he wrote this piece but couldn’t perform or publish it in the 1970’s, due to religious restrictions by the Soviet government. Vavilov may have simply attributed the song to Caccini so that he could use it in liturgical services.
The two most famous settings of the Ave Maria come from the nineteenth century, a time of heightened awareness and intrigue in the Virgin Mary. These were the years of Lourdes and several Marian apparitions as well as the time when the Immaculate Conception was finally recognized as dogma by the Church (1878). German composer Franz Schubert wrote his Ave Maria to be part of his Op. 52 songs and it was based on an epic poem by Walter Scott called “The Lady of the Lake”. In the story, a vengeful King is persecuting a young heroine, who hides in a cave and prays for safety to the Virgin Mary. Years later, we know this Ave Maria for its gorgeous harp-like accompaniment and beautiful melody. Originally written in German, it is often performed in Latin at liturgical services. Later that century in 1853, French composer Charles Gounod was improvising late one evening and discovered a melody that he could sing over a prelude by Johann Sebastian Bach (Prelude 1 in C major from the Well-Tempered Klavier, early 1720s.) Gounod then combined the text of the “Hail Mary” and his setting has become known as the Bach-Gounod Ave Maria and continues to be sung at countless Masses and services throughout the world.
Opera also has given us several beautiful versions of the Ave Maria. In 1887, Giuseppe Verdi composed an aria based on this prayer for the last act of his opera Otello. Sung by the opera’s heroine Desdemona, she prays this prayer for all those suffering, as she has suffered so much through the opera. In 1890, Pietro Mascagni also composed an Ave Maria based on the interlude from his opera Cavalleria Rusticana (this instrumental Intermezzo was used at the end of Godfather III). In France, three years later, Jules Massenet composed his opera Thais, in which an Ave Maria is set to the tune from the opera’s Méditation.
Additional versions of the Ave Maria include one by Czech composer Antonin Dvořák written following the death of his daughter in 1877. Dvořák’s wife was a singer and it is believed he wrote this piece to console her at this time. Other renditions include those by Brahms, Fauré, Bruckner, Rachmaninov and Elgar are available to listen to on the internet. It is interesting to hear how each composer uses his own compositional language, whether that of the time or sounds attributed to those of their cultural background to depict and capture the beauty and image of our Lady. As a singer, I find each version unique to study and learn; each filled with new possibilities of prayer and devotion. I hope you will take some time to listen to a few and pray the Rosary through the remainder of this month.