kukkurovaca

tj:

JOSH

This is a beautiful piece of music. Do you know this?

C.J.

[turns back] I’m Catholic.

JOSH

Hang on. Listen. Listen.

[goes to the boom box and slowly turns up the volume. A high voice in the choir sings and Josh is moved]

There, right there. It’s…miraculous.

[beat]

Schubert was crazy, you know.

C.J.

Yes.

JOSH

Do you think you have to be crazy to create something powerful?

— West Wing, s01e05 “The Crackpots and These Women”

As I mentioned earlier, I was trying to find this version of Ave Maria because I couldn’t get it out of my head after re-watching this episode. Turns out it’s not very easy to figure out. I saw a West Wing site which claimed that the singer was “Marian Anderson” but I’m almost certain that it isn’t.

I think it is the same version as you can hear on YouTube (ignore the video) and that you can find on Classical Chill Out and Relax, Vol 1. If you use Spotify, use this. Unfortunately, none of those sources identify either the singer or the orchestra.

A few other things I learned:

1) Schubert’s Ave Maria isn’t really Ave Maria, it is Ellens Gesang III, D839, Op 52 no 6, 1825 (English: “Ellen’s Third Song”):

The opening words and refrain of Ellen’s song, namely “Ave Maria” (Latin, “Hail Mary”), may have led to the idea of adapting Schubert’s melody as a setting for the full text of the traditional Roman Catholic prayer Ave Maria. The Latin version of the Ave Maria is now so frequently used with Schubert’s melody that it has led to the misconception that he originally wrote the melody as a setting for the Ave Maria. (source: Wikipedia: Ellens dritter Gesang) ¹

2) Schubert wasn’t crazy:

Factual errors: When Josh is listening to “Ave Maria” he claims that Schubert was crazy. Medically speaking, this was untrue and it’s more than likely that the writers were thinking of composer Robert Schumann, who did in fact end up in an insane asylum towards the end of his life. (source: Wikipedia: The Crackpots and These Women)

3) Although he may have had syphilis and suffered mercury poisoning. Nevertheless, his official cause of death is listed as typhoid fever, presumably because dying of an STD would have been scandalous to his surviving family members.

• C.J.’s response “I’m Catholic” would seem to suggest that she’s saying “Of course I know the Ave Maria, I’m Catholic” which is ironic since this isn’t really Ave Maria. Presumably the director tasked someone to get a copy of Ave Maria for this scene and didn’t pay much attention to which piece was actually being used.

  I tried to see if Schumann had a version of Ave Maria and as far as I can ascertain, he did not, although I did find this interesting tidbit:

  In 1840, against her father’s wishes, Schumann married pianist Clara Wieck, daughter of his former teacher, the day before she legally came of age at 21. Had they waited one day, they would have no longer needed her father’s consent, which had been the subject of a long and acrimonious legal battle, which found in favor of Clara and Robert. Clara also composed music and had a considerable concert career, the earnings from which formed a substantial part of her father’s fortune.

  …

  Prior to the legal case and subsequent marriage, the lovers exchanged love letters and rendezvoused in secret. Robert would often wait in a cafe for hours in a nearby city just to see Clara for a few minutes after one of her concerts. The strain of this long courtship (they finally married in 1840), and of its consummation, led to this great outpouring of Lieder (vocal songs with piano accompaniment). This is evident in “Widmung”, for example, where he uses the melody from Schubert’s “Ave Maria” in the postlude—in homage to Clara. Schumann’s biographers have attributed the sweetness, the doubt and the despair of these songs to the varying emotions aroused by his love for Clara and the uncertainties of their future together.

  I wonder if her father didn’t want her marrying Schumann, or didn’t want Schumann getting the profits from her musical abilities.↩

This has been today’s YouTube/Wikipedia rabbit hole.

p.s. you can watch the scene with C.J. and Josh on YouTube, although you won’t get the full effect unless you watch the entire episode, because this is the middle act of a thread which starts at the beginning and continues to the end of the episode.

Aside: By the way, this is another great use of “Embedding Disabled By Request”… someone took a clip from a show they had nothing to do with and posted it on YouTube, but they don’t want you viewing it unless you visit their YouTube page. I would love to know why people who do this feel they are entitled to dictate the terms of use for something that isn’t their creation in the first place.

I recommend installing clea.nr (formerly known as “A Cleaner YouTube”) as a browser extension so you aren’t subjected to, well, YouTube.

If anyone has a more definitive answer as to which version was in use in this episode, please let me know.