Mša Glagolskaja

Originality in art is no guarantee of quality. Leoš Janáček combined both in compositions that grew from the natural rise and fall of the Czech language, the rich folk culture of his native Moravia and a highly individual approach to harmony and rhythm. His Mša Glagolskaja or Glagolitic Mass, written in 1926 and revised after its premiere the following year, followed no obvious model. It turns a core Christian liturgical text into a joyful celebration of human creativity and the marvels of the natural world, stimulated in part by its 72-year-old composer’s love for the much younger Kamila Stösslová. The work is scored for four solo voices, choir, organ and orchestra, from which Janáček extracts an extraordinary range of colours and textures, pitching stratospheric lines for his soprano and tenor soloists and matching them with thrilling parts for high trumpets, horns and woodwinds. Having abandoned work on a setting of the Latin Mass almost two decades earlier, he found inspiration in the words of the Mass in Old Church Slavonic, brought to Moravia in the ninth century CE by the missionary saints Cyril and Methodius. “Glagolitic”, the term for the script in which their text was written, was mistakenly adopted by Janáček as the name for his Mass; its use signalled the composer’s wish to see the birth of a pan-Slavic culture. His feeling for the sounds and rhythmic stresses of the ancient Slavonic language adds to the score’s intensity, strikingly so at the opening of the “Credo” (Věruju) and, in the “Sanctus” (Svet), the irresistible declaration “Plna sut nebozem nja slavy tvojeje!” (“Heaven and earth are full of your glory”).