Ave, verum corpus K618

By a stroke of fortune, Mozart was in the spa town of Baden – where his ailing wife was taking the waters – shortly before Corpus Christi in June 1791. The choirmaster at Baden was his friend Anton Stoll and it was for him, presumably at his request, that Mozart wrote the short motet Ave, verum corpus (for chorus, organ and strings) to be performed as part of the Corpus Christi festival at the Parish Church a day or so later. It is a work of such unadorned simplicity that all kinds of theories have been put forward to account for it, such as that it represents a new style of church music that would find its culmination a few months later in the Requiem. However that may be, there was surely the practical consideration that anything more elaborate could not have been prepared in time. It is written almost entirely in four-part harmony and it is the essential modesty of the piece – judiciously offset by an unexpected modulation in the middle and a little canonic counterpoint towards the end – that underlies the impression of profound, devotional sincerity.