AVE MARIA
The mother of Jesus, Mary, had doubtful beginnings in the Gospel chronicles. Soundly rejected by her son in the Gospel of Mark, that rejection is softened in Matthew.
By the time of Luke, Mary becomes in effect the first Christian, receiving the message of God in a Virgin Conception (sometimes improperly called a Virgin Birth), and becoming the First Disciple by accepting total obedience to God's will ("I am the Lord's servant. May it be to me as you have said").
John's Gospel reconciles human and apostolic families, where they were opposed in the Gospel of Mark (Mary thought her son was out of his mind and Jesus replaced her with his followers).
But one of Jesus' last words on the Cross in John's Gospel is to assign Mary symbolic motherhood to Jesus' favorite disciple (unnamed, but presumably John himself) and symbolic sonhood to John ("Mother, here is your son"), thus redeeming the biological family (always a problem in Christianity, which has only one Father) in apostleship.
From being rejected in Mark, Mary soon became the "God-bearer" leading to a cult that is called Mariology, the worship of the Virgin Mary. This was a psychologically sound move, since it allowed the female element back into a very patriarchal (male-centered) religion.
This is doubtless why Jews made Wisdom into a Lady (Proverbs 8) and placed her with God from the beginning. But as Jesus (the Word, Wisdom) replaced her in the famous incipit of John's Gospel ("In the beginning was the Word"), Christianity needed to include a feminine element back into the religion.
This was to be the role of Mary. In fact the second most famous prayer in Christian worship is the "Ave Maria," or "Hail Mary."
There have been countless musical settings of this prayer, including a very beautiful one in Verdi's opera, Otello (sung by Desdemona). The two most famous are the settings by Schubert and Gounod (using Bach's C-major Prelude as a countersubject).
A more recent setting has become both famous and notorious. Attributed to the Renaissance Italian composer, Guilio Caccini, in fact the setting was an obvious forgery by the Russian lutist-composer, Vladimir Vavilov (d. 1973). It's not clear how the piece came to be attributed to Caccini, since Vavilov, fond of musical forgeries, attributed it to "Anonymous."
Regardless, the setting, a vocalise to the words, "Ave Maria" (the rest of the prayer is omitted) has become enormously popular in countless recordings by Charlotee Church, Andrea Bocelli, and the South Korean soprano, Sumi Jo, among others.
Luckily, there's a performance by Sumi Jo (and others) on youtube. Enjoy.
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