Ave Maria

Schubert wrote it in 1825 as one of seven songs from Walter Scott's long poem The Lady of the Lake, published in 1810 and read all over Europe. He set it in the German translation of Adam Storck. In the poem Ellen Douglas, hiding with her exiled father in a cave above Loch Katrine, sings a prayer to the Virgin Mary while a harper plays, and a chieftain on his way to battle stops to listen. The song's proper title is Ellens dritter Gesang, Ellen's third song, and the seven were published together in 1826 as Schubert's Opus 52.

Ellen's prayer opens with the words Ave Maria, and at some point singers began fitting the whole Latin prayer of that name to his melody. It fits well enough that most people now assume he wrote it for the Latin. That is the version sung at weddings and funerals, and in 1940 Walt Disney closed Fantasia with it, in English, after Night on Bald Mountain. The melody is the same in all of them.

The song is marked very slow, and the voice moves in small, quick turns between long notes, the way a singer ornaments a line. This page carries one verse of it, once through, written at doubled note values so the turns can be read as eighth notes. A few of Schubert's quickest figures have been simplified to fit, each to the notes that carry its shape.

On a mandolin in D the whole song sits on the A and E courses in first position, from the open A to the a at the fifth fret of the E course. The long notes want a slow, even tremolo, and the turns between them are the hard part: they have to come out of the tremolo and go back into it without a bump. The chromatic notes, a G sharp, an F natural and a D sharp, are all one fret from a note in the key. Learn it at the first speed, and let every long note ring for its full length.