Who sang ave maria originally

• The original words of Ave Maria (Hail Mary) were in English, being part of a poem called The Lady of the Lake, written in 1810 by Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832). The poem drew on the romance of the legend regarding the 5th century British leader King Arthur, but transferred it to Scott's native Scotland. In 1825 during a holiday in Upper Austria, the composer Franz Schubert (1797-1828) set to music a prayer from the poem using a German translation by Adam Storck. Scored for piano and voice, it was first published in 1826 as "D839 Op 52 no 6." Schubert called his piece "Ellens dritter Gesang" (Ellen's third song) and it was written as a prayer to the Virgin Mary from a frightened girl, Ellen Douglas, who had been forced into hiding.

• The song cycle proved to be one of Schubert's most financially successful works, the Austrian composer being paid by his publisher 20 pounds sterling, a sizable sum for a musical work in the 1820s. Though not written for liturgical services, the music proved to be inspirational to listeners, particularly Roman Catholics, and a Latin text was substituted to make it suitable for use in church. It is today most widely known in its Latin "Ave Maria" form.

• In a letter from Schubert to his father and step-mother he writes about "Ave Maria" and the other songs in his "Lady of the Lake" cycle: "My new songs from Scott's Lady of the Lake especially had much success. They also wondered greatly at my piety, which I expressed in a hymn to the Holy Virgin and which, it appears, grips every soul and turns it to devotion."

• This piece is not to be confused with the traditional Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox prayer "Hail Mary" or "Ave Maria" even though it is often sung to the melody of this piece.

• In the UK two versions of "Ave Maria" have reached the Top 40, Shirley Bassey peaking at #31 in 1962 and Lesley Garrett and Amanda Thompson reached #16 in 1993.

"Ave Maria," better known as "Hail Mary" in Latin or "Ellens Gesang III" in German, not to be confused with "Ave Maria" by Gounod and Bach, is an 1825 song by Austrian maestro Franz Schubert. The text itself is a derivation from Sir Walter Scott’s famous poem, “The Lady of the Lake”. The song’s words have inspired its usage with the Roman Catholic prayer, which bears the same name. 

Despite being composed as a prayer, Schubert’s piece was not written with any planned religious utilization for Catholicism. Although there are occasional confusions that this piece is the same as the religious Hail Mary, it is not so. The United Kingdom has seen immense popularity with the piece, with two separate versions having reached the Top 40 on the charts, with a number 16 rating for the version performed by Lesley Garrett and Amanda Thompson (1993).

The woman ‘Ellen’ mentioned in the German title was Ellen Douglas, who was the primary character and heroine of Scott’s poem. Schubert encountered Das Fräulein vom See, a German iteration of Scott’s poem, written in 1819 by Adam Storck, and immediately recognized its viability as a musical composition. His composition was crafted with one singer and one pianist in mind. This was subsequently rearranged into different piano versions, three in total, by Franz Liszt.

Schubert’s Ave Maria is a part of his Liederzyklus vom Fräulein vom See. Scott's original poem was set in the Scottish Highlands and written in English and adapted the legendary romance, with regard to the Arthurian legend. Schubert published his piece in 1826 in the form of D839 Op 52 no 6, and depicted as a prayer to the Virgin Mary, although never intended as a real-life usage for a prayer. 

Although Schubert died at the early age of 31, his Ave Maria was already considered to be an exquisite musical work, even getting published before his passing, as opposed to most of his compositions. The most prominent exposure that it received was as a part of 1940’s Fantasia by Walt Disney, where it introduced a wonderful serenity to the performance. 

Ave Maria is one of the most cherished and financially successful works of Schubert. As already mentioned, this never had liturgical purposes in mind nevertheless found tremendous acceptance and popularity among Roman Catholics, particularly in Latin. In a letter to his father, Schubert stated that Ave Maria was successful in captivating its listeners and devoting them completely to it, heart and soul. This is a testament to the melody’s brilliance and ingenious composition. 

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Related piano sheet music:

Song by Franz Schubert

"Ellens dritter Gesang" ("Ellens Gesang III", D. 839, Op. 52, No. 6, 1825), in English: "Ellen's Third Song", was composed by Franz Schubert in 1825 as part of his Op. 52, a setting of seven songs from Walter Scott's 1810 popular narrative poem The Lady of the Lake, loosely translated into German.

It is one of Schubert's most popular works. Beyond the song as originally composed by Schubert, it is often performed and recorded by many singers under the title "Ave Maria" (the Latin name of the prayer Hail Mary, and also the opening words and refrain of Ellen's song, a song which is itself a prayer to the Virgin Mary), in musically simplified arrangements and with various lyrics that commonly differ from the original context of the poem. It was arranged in three versions for piano by Franz Liszt.[1]

The Lady of the Lake and the "Ave Maria"

The piece was composed as a setting of a song (verse XXIX from Canto Three) from Walter Scott's popular narrative poem The Lady of the Lake,[2] in a German translation by Adam Storck [de] (1780–1822),[3] and thus forms part of Schubert's Liederzyklus vom Fräulein vom See. In Scott's poem, the character Ellen Douglas, the Lady of the Lake (Loch Katrine in the Scottish Highlands), has gone with her exiled father to stay in the Goblin's cave as he has declined to join their previous host, Roderick Dhu, in rebellion against King James. Roderick Dhu, the chieftain of Clan Alpine, sets off up the mountain with his warriors, but lingers and hears the distant sound of the harpist Allan-bane, accompanying Ellen who sings a prayer addressed to the Virgin Mary, calling upon her for help. Roderick Dhu pauses, then goes on to battle.[4]

Schubert's setting is said to have first been performed at the castle of Countess Sophie Weissenwolff in the little Austrian town of Steyregg and dedicated to her, which led to her becoming known as "the lady of the lake" herself.[5]

The opening words and refrain of Ellen's song, namely "Ave Maria" (Latin for "Hail Mary"), may have led to the idea of adapting Schubert's melody as a setting for the full text of the traditional Roman Catholic prayer "Ave Maria". The Latin version of the "Ave Maria" is now so frequently used with Schubert's melody that it has led to the misconception that he originally wrote the melody as a setting for the "Ave Maria".

Position within the cycle

In 1825, Schubert composed a selection of seven songs from Scott's The Lady of the Lake. They were published in 1826 as his Opus 52.

The songs are not intended for a single performer: the three songs of Ellen are for a woman's voice with piano accompaniment, while the songs for Norman and Malcolm Graeme were intended for the baritone Johann Michael Vogl. Of the remaining two songs, one was for a male ensemble and the other for a female ensemble.

1. "Ellens Gesang I", D. 837, Raste Krieger, Krieg ist aus / "Soldier rest! the warfare o'er"
2. "Ellens Gesang II", D. 838, Jäger, ruhe von der Jagd / "Huntsman, rest! thy chase is done"
3. "Bootgesang" (Hail to the Chief), D. 835, Triumph, er naht / "who in triumph approaches", for male voice quartet
4. "Coronach" (Deathsong of the women and girls), D. 836, Er ist uns geschieden / "He is gone to the mountain", for female choir
5. "Normans Gesang", D. 846, Die Nacht bricht bald herein ("Night will soon be falling")
6. "Ellens Gesang III" (Hymne an die Jungfrau / Hymn to the Virgin), D. 839, Ave Maria! Jungfrau mild / "Ave Maria! maiden mild!"
7. "Lied des gefangenen Jägers", D. 843, Mein Roß so müd / "My steed is tired"

Schubert composed the songs to the German texts. However, with the exception of No. 5, the songs were clearly intended to be published with the original English texts as well. This meant finding correspondences to Storck's sometimes quite free translations, which entailed significant difficulties.

Lyrics

"Ellens dritter Gesang"

Mezzo-soprano Dorothea Fayne, Uwe Streibel (piano)

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Use in Fantasia (1940)

Walt Disney used Schubert's song in the final part of his 1940 film Fantasia, where he linked it to Modest Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain in one of his most famous pastiches. The end of Mussorgsky's work blends with almost no break into the beginning of Schubert's song, and as Deems Taylor remarked, the bells in Night on Bald Mountain, originally meant to signal the coming of dawn, which cause the demon Chernobog to stop his dark worship and the ghosts to return to the grave, now seem to be church bells signalling the beginning of religious services. A procession of monks is shown walking along. The text for this version is sung in English, and was written by Rachel Field.[8] This version also had three stanzas, like Schubert's original, but only the third stanza made it into the film (one line in the last stanza is partially repeated to show how it is sung in the film):

The version heard in Fantasia was arranged by Leopold Stokowski especially for the film, and unlike the original, which is for a solo voice, is scored for soprano and mixed chorus, accompanied by the string section of the Philadelphia Orchestra. The soloist is Julietta Novis. The Ave Maria sequence was later featured in Very Merry Christmas Songs, which is part of Disney Sing-Along Songs, as a background movie for the song "Silent Night".

See also

• 
  Classical music portal

• "Ave Maria" by German composer Johann Sebastian Bach and French composer Charles Gounod
• "Ave Maria" by Russian composer Vladimir Vavilov, often misattributed to Italian composer Giulio Caccini
• "Ave Maria" by American R&B artist Beyoncé, a modern re-written rendition featured on her album I Am... Sasha Fierce.[9]

References

1. ^ "Liszt and the Ave Maria : Interlude.hk". Interlude.hk. 8 December 2015. Retrieved 27 July 2018.
2. ^ Spaeth, Sigmund (2005). Whitefish, Montana Stories Behind the World's Great Music, p. 114, Kessinger Publishing
3. ^ Storck, Adam (1819). Das Fräulein vom See: Ein Gedicht in sechs Gesängen von Walter Scott. Aus dem Englischen, und mit einer historischen Einleitung und Anmerkungen von D. Adam Storck, Professor in Bremen (in German). Essen: G. D. Baedeker – via HathiTrust.
4. ^ Verses XXVIII–XXX, The Lady of the Lake, Canto Three
5. ^ "cf. The Schubert Institute (UK)". Archived from the original on October 26, 2008.
6. ^ Storck 1819, pp. 135–136.
7. ^ The Lady of the Lake, Canto Three, verse XXIX.
8. ^ Taylor, Deems (1940). Fantasia. Simon & Schuster. ASIN B000KM5K12., with a foreword by Leopold Stokowski
9. ^ Horan, Tom (2008-11-08). "Beyoncé: dream girl". The Daily Telegraph. London. ISSN 0307-1235. Retrieved 2018-05-15.

External links

• "Ellens dritter Gesang": Scores at the International Music Score Library Project
• Sheet music, Cantorion.org
• The Lady of the Lake, edition with notes by William J. Rolfe, Boston 1883, with the song on page 58, and notes on alternate words on page 177

• The Lady of the Lake at Project Gutenberg, including "Hymn to the Virgin"

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