Composed in 1791 during the composition of The Magic Flute, this simple SATB piece was written for a friend, Anton Stoll. Stoll was in charge of the music at St Stephan’s in Baden bai Wien, a spa town about 16 miles south of Vienna.
It was written for the feast of Corpus Christi (which celebrates the Last Supper, and the Catholic belief of transubstantiation in the body and blood), hence the title ‘Ave verum corpus’ – the words translate to
“Hail, true Body, born of the Virgin Mary, truly suffered, sacrificed on the cross for mankind, from whose pierced side water and blood flowed: Be for us a foretaste [of the Heavenly banquet] in the trial of death.”
The work has minimal directions – just ‘sotto voce’, and is scored for choir, strings and organ, lasting 46 bars in total. Liszt made transcriptions of it, including it in his “Evocation à la Chapelle Sixtine”, and Tchaikovsky used a Liszt orchestration of Mozart’s work in his fourth orchestral suite, “Mozartiana”.
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