Ave Verum Corpus - Musical Settings

Musical Settings

Musical settings include Mozart's Ave verum corpus (K. 618), as well as settings by William Byrd and Sir Edward Elgar. There is a version by Franz Liszt, and also ones by Camille Saint-Saëns, Orlande de Lassus, Imant Raminsh, Alexandre Guilmant, Colin Mawby and Malcolm Archer. Liszt also composed a fantasy on Mozart's work, preceded by a version of Allegri's celebrated 'Miserere', under the title 'À la Chapelle Sixtine' . Versions of this fantasy for orchestra and piano four-hands follow closely the 2nd version for piano. The is also a version for organ with the title 'Evocation à la Chapelle Sixtine' The text is even used in an opera, Francis Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites. Mozart's version, with instruments only, was adapted by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky as one of the sections of his Mozartiana, a tribute to Mozart. The Vienna Boys' Choir (Wiener Sangerknaben) made some notable recordings of Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus in the 20th century. A simple version in Gregorian chant can be seen here .

A recent version of this piece was recorded by the girl choristers that make up the group "All Angels"; the words set to the music from the ITV series Brideshead Revisited by Geoffrey Burgon. Another recent setting was composed by Philip Stopford in 2007, titled simply "Ave Verum".