You just never know what you’re going to find out when you google something! I assumed (a common action for me) that Franz Biebl was someone who lived several hundred years ago, as the music has a very old-ish feel to me. Perhaps he lived in the 1600’s or 1700’s? And it certainly would never have occurred to me that:
1) the piece has become a favorite of brass bands, particularly marching bands, and 2) the piece was the subject of a lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States.
But I’ll get to the info on these two fascinating facts in a minute.
Let’s get the piece’s timeline straight first, shall we? Biebl was by no means a Classical or Romantic composer: he died in 2001. The “Ave Maria,” his best-known piece, was composed sometime prior to May 1956 when it was first performed in Fürstenfeldbruck, Germany by . . . a firemen’s chorus. Yes, that’s what our old friend Wikipedia says. Let me see if I can untangle things a bit.
Biebl was a WWII veteran, having been drafted into the German army in 1943, captured in 1944, and imprisoned in a POW camp at Fort Custer, near Battle Creek, Michigan. Yes, you read that correctly. The US had prison camps for captured German soldiers during WWII. I never had the slightest idea about this, and I used to teach American history. Apparently as the war went on the prison facilities in Europe and Britain became too crowded, so as many a half a million captured soldiers were shipped to America. The prisoners were treated well and put to work, mainly on farms, thus helping to fill the labor gap caused by so many American soldiers leaving the workforce. This was not forced slave labor; they were paid. (80 cents a day, but still!)
So Biebl served his time until 1946, when he returned to Germany and took up the post of choral director in the aforementioned town with the hard-to-pronounce name. He may have been, all at the same time, head of the town chorus as well as organist/choirmaster and teacher of the parish and so also director of the church choir. We are told that:
He had in his church choir a fireman. It was common for companies, factories, police and fire departments, etc. to sponsor an employees’ choir, which often would participate in choral competitions and festivals with other similar choirs. This fireman asked Biebl to please compose something for his fireman’s choir for such an occasion. The result was the Ave Maria (double male choir version). (Wikipedia)
Isn’t that interesting? It appears that singing in these various community choirs was a big part of town life even in the 1950’s. This wasn’t the Middle Ages! The fireman would have been a member of at least two of these choirs, Biebl’s and his employer’s. Think of all the fun it is to be a part of a performance! People sign up for this sort of stuff even today, when we’re all (supposedly) glued to our screens and unwilling to get off the couch.
One more kind-of-interesting and kind-of-funny thing before I get to the two fascinating facts at the beginning of this post: Biebl’s arrangement (which fuses together two ancient Roman Catholic texts, the Ave Maria and the Angelus) languished in obscurity for a number of years until it was brought to America by the Cornell University Glee Club in 1970. Biebl had moved on by this time to directing choral programs for Bavarian Radio, and he made it a practice to invite American choirs to perform in that venue. I’m not sure how this all worked: Who paid for this? Why did Biebl do this? Was it because he had such good memories of being a POW in America? It’s all very mysterious. But anyway, the glee club started performing the piece when they got back home, its popularity started spreading, and then the group Chanticleer recorded it. The piece became a big hit even in Germany, as Biebl’s formerly-inattentive countrymen decided that if the Americans liked it so much it must be something special. Biebl had originally written the piece for male choir (all those firemen) but he then produced several other arrangements, including the 1985 SSA TTBB version that I’ve sung with my own choir.
On to the marching bands. Why on earth would this slow, stately piece be a favorite for those groups? I honestly do not know. There are some fairly high-end groups that play it as part of their regular repertoire. I think it must be one of those things where someone heard the piece and liked it, had some influence with a group, managed to get it on a program, and it took off from there. Here’s a list of some major groups who perform it:
San Francisco Renegades
Phantom Regiment Drum and Bugle Corps
US Navy Band
NIH Community Horn Club
Pacific Crest Drum and Bugle Corps (used as their “corps song”)
And, finally, the SCOTUS connection. In the 2009-10 court term a school district sued to keep the piece from being played (without lyrics) at a high school graduation ceremony because of its “underlying religious nature.” The case got to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled in favor of the school district. It was then referred to the Supreme Court, but they declined to hear the case. Justice Samuel Alito, however, made the rare move of issuing a statement in dissent, saying that, unlike the Schubert and Gounod settings, the Biebl version was “relatively obscure.” To which I say, “Oh, come on! Couldn’t you come up with something better than that?”
Anyway, here’s a video of a very casual-in-setting-but-not-in-standards performance by two famous groups, Chanticleer and Cantus. You may remember that this piece became popular because of Chanticleer’s use of it. (Chanticleer was founded in 1978.) I also like the fact that it’s in a bar, with patrons sitting around and listening. Maybe the firemen’s chorus for whom Biebl originally wrote the piece rehearsed in a bar, or a biergarten, or a bierkeller. Whaddaya think?
Then a video by a marching band. I’ve been unable to find a good video of an actual performance by one of the groups listed in the post. If someone wants to spend quite a bit of time scrolling through YouTube, you can probably find one. I did find this on-the-field rehearsal by the Phantom Regiment that has pretty good audio:
And just in case you’re still hankering after all things Ave Maria, here’s a post I wrote back in 2013 about the Ave Maria text itself (with some football thrown in):
“How does ‘Ave Maria’ Fit into the Christmas Story?”
© Debi Simons
