The Listening Room

The prayer survives on a papyrus fragment dated by many scholars to around the year 250. Before Constantine, before the great councils, while being a Christian could still cost your life, someone wrote down a prayer that begins: we fly to thy patronage, O holy Mother of God. Christians were already running to her in the age of the martyrs, already calling her Mother of God centuries before a council defined the term.

Sung today to ancient chant, it is the deepest root in this room. Devotion to Mary is not a medieval addition. It is older than the legal Church.

Tradition gives this melody to a monk born with severe disabilities — unable to walk, his speech labored — and possessed of one of the great minds of his century. From his suffering came the tenderest prayer in the Church's treasury: Hail, holy Queen, mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope.

It is the Church's good-night song, closing Compline for centuries, and religious communities sing it at the deathbed of their members, so the last music a monk hears on earth is this melody. Listen to it in the dark, once, and you will understand a thousand years of trust.

Loving Mother of the Redeemer, gate of Heaven, star of the sea, help your falling people who strive to rise. The Advent and Christmas antiphon of the Church, so beloved in the Middle Ages that Chaucer built one of the Canterbury Tales around a child who could not stop singing it. Seven centuries later, children still learn it first.

Hail, Queen of Heaven, hail, Lady of the angels. The Lenten antiphon, lean and noble as the season it serves. Its greatest hour comes later in this room, at the deathbed of a composer. Wait for entry ten.

The Easter antiphon, and the happiest music in the chant books: Queen of Heaven, rejoice, alleluia, for He whom thou didst merit to bear has risen as He said. An old legend says it was first heard sung by angels over a plague-stricken Rome. For fifty days every year, the Church replaces every other Marian anthem with this one, because her sorrow ended in an empty tomb, and so, the Church insists, can yours.

Hail, star of the sea. Sailors and travelers have sung to Mary under this title for over a millennium, the fixed star by which a soul in dark water finds its way. The melody rises and falls like swells. The lesson is the image itself: she is not the destination, she is the star you steer by, and the harbor is her Son.

A Benedictine abbess, visionary, scientist, and now a Doctor of the Church, Hildegard wrote melodies that soar far beyond the range of ordinary chant, and she spent her most rapturous ones on Mary — the greenest branch, the luminous matter through which the Light entered. This is what one of the most brilliant women of the Middle Ages did with her genius: she sang to the Virgin.

A king of Spain assembled one of the largest songbooks of the entire Middle Ages, and every single song in it is for Mary — hymns of praise and sung stories of her miracles among ordinary people, in the language of the people. Picture a medieval king deciding the great work of his court would be four hundred songs for the Mother of God. Played today on medieval instruments, they are bright, danceable, and alive.

High on the mountain of Montserrat, pilgrims who had climbed to the Black Madonna wanted to sing and dance through the night vigil. The monks, rather than silencing them, wrote them holy songs worth dancing to and copied them into a red-bound book that survives. Joy is a form of reverence. The Church has known it for six hundred years.

The greatest composer of his age wrote this setting of the Lenten antiphon and into its prayer for mercy he wove his own name: have mercy on thy dying Dufay. He asked that it be sung at his deathbed. When death came suddenly there was no time to gather the singers, so his brothers sang it over him the next day. A man spent a lifetime mastering music and used the summit of his craft to ask Mary to be there when he died.

Often called the most perfect motet of the Renaissance — the piece that generations of musicians have studied as the model of the art. Voice enters after voice on the angel's greeting, like light moving through a window, and at the end all motion stops and the music simply asks, in plain chords: O Mother of God, remember me. The most flawless music of its century ends as a child's request.

A vast English cathedral of sound — nine waves of rejoicing addressed to the glorious Mother of God, written on the eve of the Reformation that would tear such music from England's churches. It stands like a last great Marian cathedral in sound, raised just before the lights went out, and now, centuries later, choirs everywhere have lit it again.

The medieval poem of the Mother at the cross, set by the master of Roman polyphony for the Pope's own choir, and sung for centuries in the Sistine Chapel during Holy Week. Two choirs answer each other across the chapel like grief echoing off the walls of Calvary, under Michelangelo's ceiling.

Victoria was a priest of Spain's mystical golden age — the contemporary of Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross — and he wrote nothing but sacred music his whole life. His double-choir Ave Maria sends the angel's greeting back and forth between two choirs until the room itself seems to pray. This is what the Hail Mary sounds like when a mystic sets it on fire.

Byrd was a Catholic in Elizabethan England, where the Mass was illegal and priests were executed. The greatest composer in the country wrote Marian motets and full sets of Mass music for the feasts of Our Lady, published them at real personal risk, and they were sung at whispered Masses in the hidden rooms of country houses, sometimes with a priest hole behind the wall.

Listen to his Ave Maria knowing the singers could have been arrested for it. Some people honored her when it was free. Byrd honored her when it cost.

An entire evening of prayer to write Mary's name across the sky, by the man who stood at the hinge between the old music and the new. Grand, strange, intimate, and dazzling by turns — including its own glowing Ave Maris Stella. If sacred music is a cathedral, this is one of its largest rooms. Stay as long as you like.

The Litany of Loreto — the Church's long necklace of titles for Mary, mystical rose, tower of ivory, gate of Heaven — set by the most tender of the French Baroque masters. Each title is a bead, and Charpentier polishes every one. Pray for us, the voices answer, over and over, until the repetition itself becomes the prayer.

Vivaldi was an ordained priest — the famous Red Priest of Venice — and before the Four Seasons made him immortal he wrote this dark, aching meditation on the Mother at the cross. A single low voice over shadowed strings, the brilliant Venetian setting aside all his fireworks to grieve with her.

Mary's own words from the Gospel — my soul doth magnify the Lord — set ablaze by the greatest composer who ever lived, himself a devout Lutheran. Bach poured trumpets, dancing rhythms, and tenderness into her song: the proud scattered, the humble exalted, the hungry filled. If you were ever told that loving the Bible and singing Mary's words are at odds, Bach settles the matter in half an hour of joy.

Pergolesi set the poem of Mary at Calvary while dying of tuberculosis at twenty-six, finishing it in a monastery in his final weeks. It is the sound of a young man looking at death and choosing to look at it standing next to her. The opening movement — two voices leaning into gentle dissonance — is among the most famous laments in music. He never heard it performed.

Haydn, who began his manuscripts in the name of the Lord and ended them with praise to God, gave the sorrowful Mother an hour of music that made his name across Europe before the symphonies did. The court composer's first international fame came not from a prince's entertainment but from her tears.

Mozart, twenty-one, on the eve of the long journey on which everything would go wrong, wrote this radiant short prayer to holy Mary, Mother of God, asking her care over the road ahead. It has the most Mozartean of qualities — seriousness wearing the face of sweetness. The greatest natural musical gift in history, pausing before a journey to put itself under her protection.

The most beloved melody ever attached to her name. Schubert originally wrote it as the song of a frightened young woman praying to the Virgin for protection, and the world soon set the Latin prayer itself to his melody — which is how it is most often sung now, at weddings and at funerals, at the doors in and out of life. Something in the melody believes, and it makes the listener believe with it, at least for four minutes. Start there. Four minutes of believing is a door.

The king of Italian comic opera retired young, and then, in his silence, wrote a Stabat Mater that scandalized the severe and thrilled everyone else — the Mother's grief sung with full operatic blood. Heaven does not require the great to stop being themselves. Rossini brought what he had, and what he had was melody beyond almost any man alive.

A collaboration across one hundred and thirty years. Bach, a Lutheran, wrote a prelude of perfect, patient arpeggios. Gounod, a Catholic, heard a melody floating above it and set the Hail Mary there. Neither man alone made this piece. A Lutheran and a Catholic, a century apart, built one prayer. Let that be its lesson.

Bruckner was a cathedral organist of childlike, granite faith who numbered his daily prayers in a notebook. His Ave Maria builds the angel's greeting from hushed voices to a blaze on the name of Jesus and then kneels back down into silence. Three minutes long, and many choirs' single favorite thing to sing. It sounds the way kneeling feels.

The young Brahms, a north German Protestant with no obligation and no commission, sat down and wrote an Ave Maria anyway — gentle as a lullaby, for the voices of women. Sometimes the beauty of the prayer simply outruns the boundaries people draw around it.

Dvořák began this work after the death of his infant daughter, and completed it after losing two more of his children within a single year. A father who had just buried three children sat down and set to music the Mother who watched her Son die. It is grief transfigured, ending not in despair but in a blaze of light. If you are carrying a loss, this is the room's deepest chair. He understood, and so does she.

Before Rachmaninoff's famous setting there was Tchaikovsky's — the troubled master of the ballets writing the Eastern Hail Mary with a simplicity he allowed himself almost nowhere else. Rejoice, O Virgin Mother of God. He opened the door Rachmaninoff would later walk through.

Verdi spent his life at arm's length from the Church, a self-described doubter. And then, as his final published work, the old man set two prayers to the Virgin: Dante's hymn, Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son, in the words of Saint Bernard, and the Stabat Mater. He had already given his Desdemona an Ave Maria as her last music before death in Otello. The greatest dramatist in opera, closing his long argument with Heaven, chose to end it speaking to her. Doubters keep doing that. It is worth asking why.

The Hail Mary as the Christian East sings it, written in the middle of the First World War. Barely three minutes, it builds from a whisper to a blaze of voices and settles again like snow. He asked for part of the Vigil to be sung at his own funeral. East and West are divided by much, but not by her. In this piece you can hear the other half of the ancient family praying.

The most famous modernist in music — the man who caused a riot with the Rite of Spring — returned to the faith of his childhood in middle age and wrote, of all things, a small, austere, obedient Ave Maria for unaccompanied voices. After all the revolutions, a short prayer. Even the avant-garde comes home.

Poulenc had drifted far from the faith. Then a close friend was killed suddenly, and days later Poulenc stood before the ancient Black Madonna of Rocamadour, and everything changed. Within a week he wrote these litanies to the Black Virgin — the first sacred music of his life, plain, stark, and shaking. He spent the rest of his career writing masterpieces of faith and credited that hour in front of her image. This is the sound of a man on his knees for the first time in years.

A modest German choirmaster wrote this setting of the Angelus — the ancient prayer of the angel's announcement to Mary — for a firemen's choir. It crossed the ocean, and American choirs fell in love with it so completely that it is now sung everywhere, its harmonies blooming like slow light. Written in the age of the atom and the television, and it sounds like it was always there.

You will find this piece everywhere labeled with the name of a Renaissance composer, Caccini. The truth is better. It was written in the Soviet Union, under official atheism, by a poor Leningrad musician named Vladimir Vavilov, who published his own works under borrowed and anonymous names. So a man in a state that punished faith composed a soaring Ave Maria, gave it away without his name, and died in poverty before the world fell in love with it. She receives music from places her enemies believe they have sealed shut.

The second movement sets words scratched into the wall of a Gestapo cell by an eighteen-year-old Polish girl: a message to her mother not to weep, and a plea to the Queen of Heaven to support her always. Górecki found her prayer and built around it one of the most mourned-over pieces of the twentieth century — music that unexpectedly swept the world's charts decades later. In the darkest room of the darkest century, a teenage girl wrote to Mary on the wall. The world has been listening to her ever since.

Tavener, the towering English mystic of modern sacred music, wrote this radiant two-choir hymn in memory of his own mother, on an ancient text that dares to say all creation rejoices in her. One choir is the echo of the other, Heaven answering earth. Two minutes long, and it leaves silence behind it the way incense leaves scent.

The most performed living composer of sacred music — a man whose bell-like style was born out of silence and faith under Soviet rule — has returned to Mary again and again: a Magnificat of still, glassy wonder, and a tiny Bogoroditse Djevo that erupts with joy like a festival breaking out. Proof, in the present tense, that the spring has not run dry.

The great mystery the ancient text marvels at is that animals and the Blessed Virgin were the witnesses of the newborn Lord. Lauridsen's setting — perhaps the most beloved choral work written in our lifetime — holds one chord of awe for six minutes and gives Mary's name the gentlest light in the piece. Audiences who do not know what the Latin means weep anyway. The body understands before the mind does.

Not every treasure needs an orchestra. Immaculate Mary — the Lourdes hymn — still rolls through candlelight processions of the sick and the hopeful every night of pilgrimage season, its Ave, Ave carried by tens of thousands of ordinary voices. Hail Holy Queen sets the ancient Salve Regina for a parish congregation. O Sanctissima came up from the songs of Sicilian sailors.

These are simple, sturdy melodies made for unskilled voices, because her praise was never meant to be left to professionals. The greatest performance of Marian music on earth tonight will not be in a concert hall. It will be a crowd of pilgrims with candles, singing off-key, and meaning every word.