Ave Maria (Gounod)
Encyclopedia
The Bach/Gounod Ave Maria is a popular and much-recorded setting of the Latin text Ave Maria.

Written by French Romantic composer Charles Gounod
Charles Gounod
Charles-François Gounod was a French composer, known for his Ave Maria as well as his operas Faust and Roméo et Juliette.-Biography:...

 in 1859, his Ave Maria consists of a melody
Melody
A melody , also tune, voice, or line, is a linear succession of musical tones which is perceived as a single entity...

 superimposed
Superimposition
In graphics, superimposition is the placement of an image or video on top of an already-existing image or video, usually to add to the overall image effect, but also sometimes to conceal something .This technique is used in cartography to produce photomaps by superimposing grid lines, contour lines...

 over the Prelude No. 1 in C major, BWV 846, from Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier
The Well-Tempered Clavier
The Well-Tempered Clavier , BWV 846–893, is a collection of solo keyboard music composed by Johann Sebastian Bach...

, written by J.S. Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer, organist, harpsichordist, violist, and violinist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra, and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ultimate maturity...

 some 137 years earlier. (The version used by Gounod has the addition of one measure (m.23), found only in the Schwenke manuscript and the Simrock printed edition based upon it, but not in the other Bach manuscripts or the scholarly Bischoff and G. Henle Verlag Urtext printed editions.)


There are many different instrumental arrangement
Arrangement
The American Federation of Musicians defines arranging as "the art of preparing and adapting an already written composition for presentation in other than its original form. An arrangement may include reharmonization, paraphrasing, and/or development of a composition, so that it fully represents...

s of the Bach/Gounod Ave Maria, including for violin and guitar, string quartet, piano solo, cello, and even trombones. It is often performed in Christian wedding ceremonies. Pop/Rock
Pop music
Pop music is usually understood to be commercially recorded music, often oriented toward a youth market, usually consisting of relatively short, simple songs utilizing technological innovations to produce new variations on existing themes.- Definitions :David Hatch and Stephen Millward define pop...

 singers such as Chris Cornell, and opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...

 singers, such as Luciano Pavarotti
Luciano Pavarotti
right|thumb|Luciano Pavarotti performing at the opening of the Constantine Palace in [[Strelna]], 31 May 2003. The concert was part of the celebrations for the 300th anniversary of [[St...

, as well as choir
Choir
A choir, chorale or chorus is a musical ensemble of singers. Choral music, in turn, is the music written specifically for such an ensemble to perform.A body of singers who perform together as a group is called a choir or chorus...

s have recorded it hundreds of times during the twentieth century. Sergio Franchi
Sergio Franchi
Sergio Franchi was an Italian tenor.Franchi was born in Cremona, Italy. His father wanted him to become an electrical engineer, so he studied both music and engineering simultaneously. The family moved to South Africa in 1952, where Sergio worked part-time as a draftsman, while continuing to study...

 recorded it on his 1965 RCA Victor Billboard
Billboard (magazine)
Billboard is a weekly American magazine devoted to the music industry, and is one of the oldest trade magazines in the world. It maintains several internationally recognized music charts that track the most popular songs and albums in various categories on a weekly basis...

Top 40 Album, The Heart of Christmas (Cuor' Di Natale).

Later in his career, Gounod also composed a setting of Ave Maria for a four-part SATB
SATB
In music, SATB is an initialism for soprano, alto, tenor, bass, defining the voices required by a chorus or choir to perform a particular musical work...

 choir, which is musically unrelated to the better-known solo version.

See also

  • "Ellens dritter Gesang
    Ellens dritter Gesang
    Ellens dritter Gesang , in English: "Ellen's Third Song", was composed by Franz Schubert in 1825 as part of his Opus 52, a setting of seven songs from Walter Scott's popular epic poem The Lady of the Lake, loosely translated into German.It has become one of Schubert's most popular works under the...

    " by Franz Schubert
    Franz Schubert
    Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer.Although he died at an early age, Schubert was tremendously prolific. He wrote some 600 Lieder, nine symphonies , liturgical music, operas, some incidental music, and a large body of chamber and solo piano music...

     also known as "Ave Maria".
  • Ave Maria (disambiguation)

External links

  • Ave Maria available at the International Music Score Library Project
    International Music Score Library Project
    The International Music Score Library Project , also known as the Petrucci Music Library after publisher Ottaviano Petrucci, is a project for the creation of a virtual library of public domain music scores, based on the wiki principle...

  • Free sheet music for voice and piano on Cantorion.org
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