1 Ave Maria – Méditation sur le premier Prélude de piano de J.S. Bach. (
Meditation on the First Piano ... FRANZ SCHUBERT 1797-1828. Words: Sir
Walter Scott, ...
476 5950
1
Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. 2
Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei,
3
ora pro nobis peccatoribus 4
nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen. 5
6
2
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
3
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
0
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
9
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
5
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 6
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 7
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 8
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 9
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 10
Executive Producers Robert Patterson, Lyle Chan Mastering Albert Zychowski, Sony Music Mastering Editorial and Production Manager Hilary Shrubb Publications Editor Natalie Shea Booklet Design Imagecorp Pty Ltd Cover Photo Den Reader/Photolibrary ABC Classics thanks Alexandra Alewood and Melissa Kennedy. 1993 1, 1995 3, 1996 9, 1999 5, 2000 0, 2001 7, $, 2002 4, %, 2003 6, !, £, 2004 @, 2006 2, 2007 8, ^ Australian Broadcasting Corporation This compilation was first published in 2007 and any and all copyright in this compilation is owned by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. © 2007 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Universal Music Group, under exclusive licence. Made in Australia. All rights of the owner of copyright reserved. Any copying, renting, lending, diffusion, public performance or broadcast of this record without the authority of the copyright holder is prohibited.
11
