Held here as a hymn, the Ave Maria is the Angelic Salutation, the greeting of the angel Gabriel to Mary at the Annunciation, joined to the words of Elizabeth and to a later petition, which has been set to music countless times and is among the most frequently composed texts in the Western choral tradition. Its scriptural core is drawn from the Gospel of Luke, and to the salutation the church added the prayer asking Mary to intercede for sinners, the whole reaching its settled form in the sixteenth century. As a sung text it has inspired settings from medieval plainchant and Renaissance polyphony to the famous nineteenth-century melodies, so that the same words serve both as the repeated prayer of the rosary and as a centrepiece of sacred music. The hymn expresses the Catholic and Orthodox honouring of Mary as the mother of Christ who prays for the faithful, and its musical settings have carried the words far beyond the bounds of formal devotion into the wider culture.
Its liturgical form, ending with the petition to pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, only reached general fixed use after the Council of Trent, and the prayer's dual timeframe, asking for intercession both in ordinary life and at the moment of death, has shaped how composers approach it musically, often shifting from serene melody at the opening greeting to a more solemn register at its close. Among the countless musical settings, those by Renaissance composers written for unaccompanied choir remain the most widely performed in liturgical contexts, while later Romantic settings are more often heard in concert than in church.