This paper studies vanishing of Ext modules over Cohen–Macaulay local rings. The main result of this paper implies that the Auslander–Reiten conjecture holds for maximal Cohen–Macaulay modules of rank one over Cohen–Macaulay normal local rings. It also recovers a theorem of Avramov–Buchweitz–Şega and Hanes–Huneke, which shows that the Tachikawa conjecture holds for Cohen–Macaulay generically Gorenstein local rings.