Abstract
The paper traces the provenance of Franz Schubert’s famous song, Ave Maria! Jungfrau mild, starting from the source of inspiration of Sir Walter Scott’s poem, continuing with Schubert’s own composition, set to the German translation by Adam Storck, and with the post-mortem adaptation of the German text into the established Latin one by the composer’s brother, Ferdinand Schubert, for church use. The musical analysis of the piece starts from the historical context and captures the aforementioned poetic sources in Schubert’s music. This paper looks into aspects related to the aesthetics of tonality, according to the theorizations of Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, whereas the formal analysis presents the stability of the musical form, based on the classical structure of the lyrics. Further discussed is the influence these literary texts had in the epoch. In the course of the paper, the author provides a versified Romanian translation of the German version of Schubert’s song, proposing not only the preservation of the meaning but also the harmonization of the words with the musical structure. The study also examines the reception of the song in contemporary times, following great singers or performers who have established its popularity, but also versions used in animated films, arrangements in punkademics manner, covers or crossover approaches, while also touching the Romanian musical space (through singers’ interpretations or works by Romanian composers). The author concludes that the entire process of the historical evolution of the piece is based on stages corresponding to the readymade aesthetics.

Keywords: reception of Franz Schubert, Ellens Gesang III (Ave Maria), punkademics, readymade.

About the author
Elena Maria Șorban is a Romanian researcher and university professor of music history at the ”Gheorghe Dima”  National Academy of Music and the “Babeș-Bolyai” University in Cluj. Her PhD treats Western plainchant in medieval Transylvania. Her habilitation debates the topic of academic vs. public musicology. Her fields of interest also include the modern and contemporary music and its didactical approaches. She received grants from the Kodály Institute Hungary, the German Academic Exchange Service DAAD, the National Music University Bucharest, the EU Erasmus Program, and the Paul Sacher Foundation Basel. She lectured as a guest in Budapest, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Dublin, Vienna, Lisbon, Sankt Petersburg a.o. She is part of the organizational boards of the European Early Music Festival and Summer University in Miercurea Ciuc, Romania, and musica suprimata Berlin. She is a member, a.o., of the Union of Composers and Musicologists of Romania, the Romanian Mozart Society, the Sigismund Toduță Foundation, Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Mittel- und Osteuropäische Musikgeschichte Leipzig, CESEM at Universidade Nova, Lisbon.

DOI: 10.47809/MP.2024.39.01.04

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