Ave Maria

. This phrase, which means literally "Greetings, Mary," is the first phrase in a certain passage in the book of Luke, generally called the Annunciation, in which the Angel Gabriel is said to have informed the maid that she bore a divine child. (This charming story is considered to have been added to the oral tradition by the Greek Christians almost a century after the birth of Jesus. Google "immaculate conception", and you should get some authoritative opinions on the matter.) I was inspired to write about the phrase because I happened to have been "ripping" an album of the Anonymous4, in which was featured a track called Ave Maria (dated between 500 and 1500, according to Susan Hellauer's liner notes), and the ripping program (the legendarily feeble-minded Win Media Player) suggested that the composer was Franz Schubert. Full points for attempted helpfulness, but this simply shows that the brains out at the Internet music database only know one piece called Ave Maria. In addition to Franz Schubert's evidently highly popular Ave Maria, there is Charles Gounod's tune, written to be sung over Prelude No. 1 in C major, from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, and countless others, including (I just learned this) Anton Bruckner. Johannes Brahms has set the words as well. How old is the Ave Maria? Obviously the New Testament accounts date from around the first or second century, and the original passage from Luke (taken from two verses in Chapter 1) dates from then. A rough translation goes like this:

Hail (Mary), blessed art thou above all women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb!

By the time the year 1500 had arrived, the prayer was now significantly expanded:

Hail Mary, full of grace, Blessed art thou above all women, And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of god, Be with us sinners, now and in The hour of our death.

It so happens, though, and I'm almost certain of this, that Schubert's lyrics have additional elements that have nothing to do with this prayer (which in turn has only the slightest origins in the Bible, which again, in turn, contains only the merest fraction of all the competing Christian writings known at the time.) The last "petition in the prayer" was added, according to Wikipedia, around the time of the Council of Trent, and is at least partly attributed to Petrus Canisius, a Dutch Jesuit. At any rate, considering the popularity of the text, and the plethora of composers who have set it over the centuries, it is a charming eccentricity of Media Player and it's database that it singles out Schubert to be the lone recipient of credit for the music. At the time of the carol sung by Anonymous 4, of course, Schubert was not even a twinkle in his father's eye. (At least it didn't suggest Celtic Woman, which would have been inexcusable.) Arch, baffled by the illogic of Roman Catholicism, but content. The Wisdom of God is the foolishness of men, according to them, and we should leave the Catholics to further contribute to the wisdom of their deity.