There are a number of compositions in musical history that were attributed to the wrong author. This famous “Ave Maria” is one of them.

Vladimir Fjodorovich Vavilov was not only an exceptionally gifted Russian guitarist and lutenist but also a composer highly knowledgeable in Baroque and Renaissance music history and practice. In the 1960s, he organized a series of early music concerts and also wrote a textbook for beginners on the seven-string guitar.

When, in 1970, he published an album of Lute Music from the XVI-XVII Centuries, he included the aria “Ave Maria” for voice, lute, and organ, ascribing it to an anonymous author of the 16th century, who was later allegedly identified as the Italian Baroque composer Giulio Caccini (1551–1618).

It was actually Vavilov’s own composition.

Scientific studies have shown that when a group of people make music together, their brainwaves actually and measurably cohere. The version of Vavilov’s “Ave Maria” we are hearing—here performed by the chamber orchestra Santa Maria del Suffragio di Fano under Daniele Rossi and sung by the beautiful Russian soprano Nina Solodovnikova—is, in our view, one of such vocal sublimity and a perfection of harmony between singer and orchestra that it is without equal.

Related:

Nina Solodovnikova homepage

Vladimir F. Vavilov (Wikipedia)

Ave Maria by Vavilov (Wikipedia)

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