Ave María
by David Bisbal
How to study this song
“Ave María” carries 15 Spanish words, 4 adjectives and 24 verb forms — 43 study entries in all, graded A1+. Begin with cielo, palabra and vida: get those and most of the lines stop being guesswork. This one leans on its verbs: 24 distinct forms against 4 adjectives, so conjugation is where the effort goes. At this level the goal is recognition: hear a word, place it, keep going.
The words of this song, in several languages
Every word below is taken from this song and translated by us. Nothing here is the lyric itself — these are the individual words you need in order to follow it.
Vocabulary
| ES | EN | IT | FR | PT | NL | DE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| cielo | heaven, sky (m.) | cielo | ciel | céu |
What this song teaches you
Level · A1+
- Vocabulary words
- 15
- Adjectives
- 4
- Word combos
- 11
- Expressions
- 11
- Verb forms
- 24
- Quiz questions
- 35
Background
About the song
«Ave María» is the first single that David Bisbal released under his own name. It came out on 13 May 2002 on the Spanish label Vale Music, three months after the final of the television contest that had made him famous, and it is the opening track of his debut album «Corazón latino». The recording lasts three minutes and thirty-one seconds and was written by Kike Santander and Gustavo Santander, two Colombian brothers who worked from Miami.
Bisbal was born in Almería, in the south-east of Spain, on 5 June 1979. According to the Spanish Wikipedia biography, in 1997 he was working at a municipal plant nursery when somebody heard him sing and sent him to an audition; he became the vocalist of Orquesta Expresiones, a dance band that played at summer festivals. On 22 October 2001 he entered the first edition of «Operación Triunfo», a talent show in which sixteen young singers lived and studied together in front of the cameras. In the final, on 11 February 2002, he finished second behind Rosa López with 20.9% of the votes.
The song was recorded between March and April 2002 in Miami, only weeks after that final. The Spanish Wikipedia entry describes it as commercial pop with a fast, danceable rhythm, and that is the plan of the whole record: Latin pop made by a team of producers headed by Kike Santander, with sessions in studios in Barcelona, New York and Miami. The single arrived before the album and introduced the public to a new solo voice that, until then, had only been heard singing other people's hits on television.
The words are a flirtation built on a greeting. The singer speaks to a woman called María with the Latin salutation that opens the best-known Catholic prayer, and asks her when she will finally belong to him. If she loved him, he says, he would hand her all he has and carry her up to heaven. In the verses he begs for a single word to bring him back to life, admits that he is lost without her, and asks her to wrap him up, shelter him, show him the way out and take him along. The pre-chorus explains why: he cannot name what he feels on seeing her, he burns inside and falls more in love each time. For a learner the song is a short lesson in the conditional (daría, llevaría), the imperfect subjunctive after "si" (quisieras), the simple future (serás) and, above all, the imperative with a pronoun attached: dime, llévame, enséñame, dímelo.