Along with his setting of Walter Scott's Ellens Gesange III Schubert's setting of Novalis' Marie (D. 658), from May 1819, is as close as the proto-pantheist composer ever actually got to writing an Ave Maria. But, while this Marie does pray to the Christian mother of God, it is once removed from the Christian Mary. Mary is the Virgin Mother of God, and her purity is one of the icons of the Roman Catholic Church. Novalis' Marie was rather, like so much of the poet's work, inspired by and dedicated to his beloved Sophie, who died at 15 and whose unsullied purity was one of the great regrets of Novalis' life. Indeed, Novalis' Marie is truly sensuality sublimated: the poem even goes so far as to reject the sacred Mary as an icon in order to embrace, so to speak, the profane Sophie.

Schubert's setting of Novalis' Marie is as close to perfection as one is likely to achieve in this world. The single page of music is a strophic setting of Novalis' two-verse poem, offering an endlessly gorgeous bel canto melody over a spare but effective piano accompaniment. Together, the melody and the accompaniment are the sacred and the profane rendered into the medium of music, an ideal union of the spiritual and the sexual. While the Roman Catholic Church would certainly not have approved, one suspects that Novalis would have loved it.

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