Bach Gounod Ave Maria

Many people have walked in pomp and circumstance along the aisle, arm in arm with their future life partner. Their slow happy steps were perhaps marked by that most beautiful melody  known as Schubert's Ave Maria, one of the many Ave Marias composed by numerous authors over the years. It is the most popular for such occasions; no doubt, it was the one that many of us heard in our own wedding, whilst we bowed here and there to friends and relatives, with a radiant smile of happiness. 

However, an author unintentionally composed half of an Ave Maria; to be fair, more than one-half. It was 1772 and Johann Sebastian Bach was beginning his greatest pedagogical and systematic work for the keyboard, The Well-Tempered Clavier. The book includes 24 preludes and fugues for the twelve major keys and twelve minor ones. Of enormous significance, the work helped to impose the division of the octave in exactly twelve chromatic halftones, which allowed for the mechanism of modulations (the smooth transition from one key to another within the same piece), to develop to its limits.

The first prelude is in C major; here we hear it in a modest version performed on a digital keyboard:

Clave Bien Temperado - Preludio N° 1

Many years later, during the 1850s, the author of the opera Faust, Charles Gounod, was enjoying his own interpretation of this prelude when suddenly his Muse delicately touched his shoulder suggesting to him a tune he immediately called, "Meditation on Bach’s Prelude No. 1". Soon afterwards, the French composer realised that the words of the very old prayer called in Latin Ave Maria, fitted his beautiful melody perfectly.

This is what we know today as the Bach/Gounod Ave Maria. Although less popular, it is in my opinion as beautiful as the one written by Schubert, if not more.

The version presented here is for harp and violin, which allows for a clear recognition of the prelude, and at the same time the appreciation of the obviously talented work of Gounod. Those who like singing can learn the melody here, and then use the Prelude above to rehearse their own version of the piece.