First, a possibly useful clarification: Ave Maria is not actually the name of one piece of music.

It means “Hail Mary.” It’s the beginning of the traditional Latin Catholic prayer. And there are many, many musical settings of it.

This gets confusing because one of them became so famous that, for a lot of people, Ave Maria means one thing: Schubert.

Listen to the music:

The prayer itself begins:

Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum, translated: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee!”

The first part comes largely from the Gospel of Luke, from the greetings of the angel Gabriel and then Elizabeth to Mary. The prayer developed over time into the fuller Hail Mary Catholics pray today.

But the famous Schubert version has a slightly strange history.

Schubert’s Ave Maria

Schubert’s Ave Maria was not originally a setting of the Latin Hail Mary.

He wrote the piece in 1825 as Ellens dritter Gesang (“Ellen’s Third Song”), one of several songs based on Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake, using a German translation by Adam Storck. The character Ellen is praying to Mary, so each stanza begins with the words Ave Maria.

The Latin Hail Mary was fitted to Schubert’s melody later. That version became enormously popular, to the point that it is now what most people mean by “Schubert’s Ave Maria.”

It’s also only one of many settings of the prayer. The Bach/Gounod Ave Maria is another of the best known: Gounod added a melody over Bach’s Prelude No. 1 in C Major. The piece usually called “Caccini’s Ave Maria” is actually much newer, written by Vladimir Vavilov in the 20th century and originally published anonymously. Bruckner, Josquin, Saint-Saëns and many other composers have also written settings, along with various chant versions.

So if you hear two completely different pieces both called Ave Maria, that’s why. The title is simply the opening of the prayer, and composers have been setting those words to music for centuries.

Why is Ave Maria sung at weddings and funerals?

Ave Maria is strongly associated with both Catholic weddings and funerals, although when and whether it is sung during the liturgy depends on local practice and the particular church.

Musically, Schubert’s version works surprisingly well in either context. It is slow, lyrical and relatively restrained. It doesn’t sound specifically like a funeral piece, nor does it sound particularly celebratory. That makes it adaptable.

The Latin text itself is also familiar:

Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum…

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…”

For Catholics, these aren’t simply beautiful Latin words. They are the beginning of one of the most familiar prayers in Catholic life. That obviously changes the context when Ave Maria is sung in a church rather than simply performed as a classical song.

Why are there so many versions?

Because Ave Maria is a text, rather than a single composition.

That distinction is easy to miss because Schubert’s setting became so famous. But composers are essentially doing the same thing composers have always done with the Kyrie, Gloria, Agnus Dei, Salve Regina and other traditional sacred texts: writing new music for words that already exist.

It also means there isn’t really one correct musical style for an Ave Maria. Some settings are choral. Some are written for solo voice. Some are extremely elaborate; others are essentially chant.

Personally, I prefer the more restrained end of that spectrum. Ave Maria can very easily become a vocal showcase, especially in the Schubert setting, and that isn’t usually what I’m interested in when I sing sacred music.

In my own arrangements I tend to keep things fairly simple: natural phrasing, space around the voice, and less production rather than more.

There will almost certainly continue to be new Ave Maria settings, too. It is one of the central texts of Marian music, and there is no reason for composers to stop writing music for it simply because several older versions became famous.