Composers Datebook

So what do you call a setting of the Latin mass that is not in Latin? Well, if you’re the Moravian-born composer Leoš Janáček, you call it “Glagolitic,” since your Mass sets an Old Church Slavonic text written down in a script called that. The idea came from a clerical friend who complained about the lack of original religious music in Czechoslovakia and suggested Janáček’s do something about it. His “Glagolitic Mass” premiered in Brno on today’s date in 1927. One reviewer wrote it was “a marvelous religious work of an old composer” – to which Janacek snapped back: “I am NOT old. And I am certainly NOT religious!” Now, people do say “you’re only as old as you feel,” and the 73-year old Janáček had for many years been in love with a much younger woman who inspired his best works, and rather than any religious convictions, Janacek told another reporter that the piece was in fact jump-started by an electrical storm he witnessed and described as follows: ‘It grows darker and darker. Already I am looking into the black night; flashes of lightning cut through it . . . I sketch nothing more than the quiet motive of a desperate frame of mind to the words ‘Gospodi pomiluj’ [Love have mercy] and nothing more than the joyous shout ‘Slava, Slava!’ [Glory].”