The story behind Ave Maria
The Ave Maria people hush a room for at Christmas is, in its original form, Franz Schubert's setting of Ellen's third song. He wrote it in 1825. The words he set are German. They open with Ave Maria because the character is praying to the Virgin, not because he sat down to compose the church's Latin prayer.
That distinction is the whole page. A later habit fitted a Latin Ave Maria text to his melody. Charles Gounod's meditation on Bach's Prelude in C is a different piece that people also call Ave Maria. Neither fact makes Schubert's song a setting of the complete liturgical prayer. He wrote a dramatic song that December adopted.
History and origins
In 1810 Walter Scott published The Lady of the Lake, a narrative poem set in the Scottish Highlands. One episode finds Ellen Douglas in hiding, singing a prayer to the Virgin for safety through the night. The poem's song begins, in English, with Ave Maria, and then continues as a plea from a girl in a wild place, not as the Hail Mary of the rosary. Schubert did not set Scott's English. He set a German translation by Adam Storck, and he set three songs of Ellen. The third, Ellens Gesang III, catalogued as D. 839, is the one the world shortened to Ave Maria. The catalogue number and the German title are the accurate names. Ave Maria is the nickname that stuck because it is the first thing a listener hears.
Schubert wrote the song in 1825, in the orbit of a holiday with friends and of his fascination with Scott's poem. The piano introduction rocks like a barcarolle or a prayer murmured in even breaths. The voice enters with the greeting, then asks the mild Virgin to hear a maiden's plea from a stern, wild rock. The singer wants safety until morning, even if people are cruel. It is theater and devotion at once: a character prayer inside a song cycle habit, published among Schubert's lieder. Nothing in the original text narrates Bethlehem, the shepherds, or the birth. Christmas was not the assignment.
The Latin overlay came because the opening words invited it and because church musicians wanted the tune. A Latin Ave Maria text, drawing on the liturgical greeting, was fitted to the melody for use in worship and at concerts where Latin signaled sacredness. That adaptation is now so common that many singers never learn Storck's German or Scott's situation. It is a legitimate singing tradition only if it is labeled as an adaptation. The melody can carry the Hail Mary. Schubert did not underlay the full prayer, with its petitions as the liturgy knows them, and then accidentally write a highland girl around it. The order is the other way.
Gounod is the other mix up. In the 1850s Charles Gounod wrote a melody over the Prelude in C major from Book I of Bach's Well Tempered Clavier, and that melody is also sung to Ave Maria words. The Bach prelude is the accompaniment. Gounod is the tune. If a Christmas program lists Ave Maria and does not say whose, the organist and the soprano may be holding different pieces. Schubert's is the rocking lied with the Scott origin. Gounod's is the Bach prelude with a later melody on top. They share a title people love and almost nothing else. Christmas keeps both because both sound like a chapel even when one of them began in a poem about a hunt and a fugitive.
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Full lyrics
Ellens Gesang III
Ave Maria! Jungfrau mild,
Erhoere einer Jungfrau Flehen,
Aus diesem Felsen starr und wild
Soll mein Gebet zu dir hinwehen.
Wir schlafen sicher bis zum Morgen,
Ob Menschen noch so grausam sind.
O Jungfrau, sieh der Jungfrau Sorgen,
O Mutter, hoer ein bittend Kind!
Ave Maria!
The text above follows a standard public domain version. Singers will meet small changes from book to book, especially in folk carols.
Lyrics presented for educational and personal use. Sing along responsibly this holiday season!
Meaning and symbolism
In Scott and Storck, Ellen asks a mother to hear a daughter. The safety she wants is immediate: let us sleep until morning, see a maiden's fear, hear a pleading child. Sung at Christmas, those sentences pick up an extra echo. The season already has a mother and a child, and a culture that sings to Mary will hear Ellen's Ave as part of that circle. The echo is real. It is not what Schubert printed. Meaning in December is partly the story of a frightened girl in Scott, and partly the story congregations have laid on the tune since.
The Latin adaptation shifts the meaning toward the church's own salutation: full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed is the fruit of thy womb. That is a different poem. It praises Mary in liturgical language and names Jesus explicitly as that fruit. Many worshipers want exactly that poem and love Schubert's melody as its vessel. They can have it if the program says the vessel and the poem were joined later. Pretending the Latin is what D. 839 originally underlaid teaches a false history of a very famous song.
Fun facts and statistics
- Franz Schubert composed Ellens Gesang III, D. 839, in 1825.
- The text is Adam Storck's German translation of Ellen's song from Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake.
- Ellen's song is a plea to the Virgin for safety, and it opens with the words Ave Maria.
- Schubert did not set the full Latin liturgical prayer.
- A Latin Ave Maria text was fitted to his melody later and is now often sung at Christmas.
- Charles Gounod's Ave Maria is a different work, a melody written over Bach's Prelude in C.
- The original song does not narrate the nativity, even though Christmas concerts adopted it.
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Top 5 most popular renditions
Franz Schubert's circle
1825
The song's first life was as a lied, sung to piano among people who knew Scott's poem or at least knew the German words in front of them. That parlor or salon scale is still the best clue to tempo and to accompaniment. The piano is not a pit orchestra. It is a second voice rocking the prayer. Modern recitals that return to Storck's text, with the highland situation in the program, are restorations of this first rendition. You hear a character, Ellen, rather than a generic sacred aria. Christmas can borrow her. It should know her name.
Franz Schubert's circle
Marian Anderson
1930s and 1940s
Anderson sang Schubert's Ave Maria as one of the pillars of her recital life, with a contralto seriousness that made the prayer feel both personal and public. For American listeners in the 1930s and 1940s her voice was already a moral fact, and this melody became one of the places that fact met a European masterwork. She often sang in the Latin adaptation or in a concert translation familiar to her public, which is itself a lesson in the song's double life. The line is broad, the hush is not empty, and the Virgin is addressed without sentimentality. Later singers inherit her gravity whether they know it or not.
Marian Anderson
Luciano Pavarotti
late 20th century
Pavarotti's performances, often in large halls and with orchestra, show the lied stretched to ceremony. The rocking pulse becomes a processional, and the final Ave Maria can fill a cathedral or a stadium broadcast at Christmas. Purists miss the piano and the German. Millions learned the tune from him anyway. His reading is an honest chapter, not a mistake, as long as someone nearby can say that the original is a Scott setting. The voice itself is the argument for endurance: a melody that can take this much sound was built with a strong spine.
Luciano Pavarotti
Jessye Norman
late 20th century
Norman brought a vast sound and an unusually careful attention to text, and when she sang the song in German she returned weight to Storck's consonants and to Ellen's fear. That choice is a kind of scholarship the public will accept from a great voice. The prayer for safety until morning stops being a vague sacred mood and becomes a sentence. In a Christmas concert her approach justifies the programming: not because the Highlands are Bethlehem, but because a plea to Mary can be specific. Specificity is what celebrity performances often sand away.
Jessye Norman
Parish and concert Latin adaptations
since the 19th century
The most common rendition now is the Latin salutation on Schubert's melody, sung by a church soprano in December with organ. It is beautiful, widespread, and historically secondary. Naming it as an adaptation takes nothing from the devotion of the people who stand for it. It prevents the false lesson that Schubert composed the rosary text in order. If the leaflet says Latin text adapted to Ellens Gesang III, the congregation is treated as capable of two ideas at once. They are. The hush they came for still arrives on the first phrase.
Parish and concert Latin adaptations
Sheet music
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Notes for singers
If you place Ave Maria in a December service, a school program, or a living room sing, teach Ellens Gesang III, D. 839 before you add harmony. A confident melody lets guests enter on the refrain. Say the names when you introduce it. The words are credited to Walter Scott, in German by Adam Storck, and the music to Franz Schubert. The year to remember is 1825, and the place to name is Austria.
This sits in the library as a sacred song. Let that tradition set the tempo. A lullaby loses its point if it is hurried. A dance carol loses its point if every syllable is precious. Leave a breath at the end of the verse so the next line feels chosen rather than chased.
Franz Schubert composed Ellens Gesang III, D. 839, in 1825. Hold that fact in the introduction you speak, not only in a program note. The text is Adam Storck's German translation of Ellen's song from Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake. Those two details give a listener a reason to hear the song as a made thing, not as wallpaper.
When the group is small, one voice can carry the verse and everyone can take the refrain. When the group is a choir, decide in advance whether you are telling a story or painting a picture. Story songs want clear words. Picture songs can bloom. Ave Maria will tell you which it is after a single unaccompanied read through.
Questions readers ask
No. In 1825 he set Adam Storck's German translation of Ellen's song from Walter Scott's poem The Lady of the Lake. That song opens by greeting the Virgin, Ave Maria, and then asks protection through the night. A Latin liturgical text was fitted to the melody afterward. The Latin version is an adaptation. The original is Ellens Gesang III, D. 839.
Because it addresses Mary, because the melody sounds devotional, and because churches wanted it in December. The original poem does not tell the nativity. Christmas use is an adoption, an old and understandable one. Keep the adoption and keep the origin. A program note of two sentences can do both without cooling the room.
Gounod wrote a melody in the 1850s to be sung over Bach's Prelude in C major from the Well Tempered Clavier. People call that piece Ave Maria too. The accompaniment is Bach's prelude, not Schubert's rocking piano figure. If a service lists the title alone, ask which composer is meant before the rehearsal starts. The two works share words people love and not a common score.
Ellen Douglas is a character in Scott's Lady of the Lake. In the poem she sings this prayer while in danger, asking the Virgin to hear a maiden and to grant safety until morning. Schubert's song is her song, in German. She is not Mary, and she is not a Christmas pageant role. Knowing her name makes the plea sharper even when a choir later sings Latin instead.
Why this song endures
The melody endures because it sounds like comfort the first time you hear it, and because the words Ave Maria are a door almost anyone will walk through. Schubert wrote something singers can pour a life into. Marian Anderson, Pavarotti, parish sopranos, and pop tenors have all found a different temperature in the same rocking bars. A tune that survives that range of voices is not fragile.
It endures at Christmas by adoption. The church year needed songs for Mary, and this one arrived already wearing her name. Adoption is an honorable history if you do not forge the birth certificate. Scott's Ellen, Storck's German, Schubert's D. 839, a later Latin fit, and a wholly different Gounod piece: that is the file. December can keep the hush and the file at the same time.