The Most Famous Setting Was Not Originally This Text at All

As a hymn text rather than only a repeated devotional formula, Ave Maria has drawn an unusually large body of independent musical composition, and the most famous example is also among the most commonly misunderstood: Franz Schubert's Ave Maria, one of the best known pieces of music associated with the prayer, was originally composed in 1825 as a setting of a German poem, Ellens dritter Gesang, a character's song from a German translation of Walter Scott's narrative poem The Lady of the Lake, and had nothing to do with the Latin Ave Maria text at that point. Only later did performers and publishers begin fitting the Latin prayer's words to Schubert's melody in place of the original German, a substitution so successful and so widely repeated in recordings and concerts that the piece is now overwhelmingly known and performed as a setting of the Latin prayer despite its entirely separate original text and occasion.

A second widely performed setting, Charles Gounod's Ave Maria of 1859, was built by composing a melody over the harmonic structure of an existing keyboard piece, the first prelude of Johann Sebastian Bach's Well Tempered Clavier, added onto that pre existing accompaniment rather than composed as an independent piece from scratch, another instance of the prayer's musical history being considerably more layered and composite than a listener encountering only the finished, familiar result would likely assume. Both cases illustrate how thoroughly the prayer's musical reception has been shaped by adaptation and reuse of existing material rather than by original composition written for the Latin text alone.