Lots of music stands [he says again]; instruments are carried in. A violin for the lame Mr Baroch. The positive organ in front, Hanáček, organist and headmaster, pulls out the very long stops. Me a treble, Hönig double bass; there were even oboes and trumpets.

Janáček's description of improvisatory liturgical music during his teenage years couldn't be further from the grand statements of the Glagolitic Mass, which opens this year's Proms. Brought up in a Monastery boarding school, Janáček played the organ, conducted the choir and eventually founded a Czech choral society in the city. It's a familiar tale to anyone who has gone through the English cathedral tradition. Yet something slipped and later in life Janáček would have nothing to do with organised religion. Whether the early death of both of his children had dented his faith – it certainly damaged his marriage – Janáček pursued a more esoteric faith. He came to think that religion was ‘concentrated death. Tombs under the floor, bones on the altar, pictures full of torture and dying. Rituals, prayers, chants – death and nothing but death. I don’t want to have anything to do with it’.


After the training at the Augustinian Monastery, Janáček wrote a mass setting in 1908, though this was an academic example from which his students at the Brno Organ School were meant to take their lessons. What had been his lifeblood at school became an academic exercise. Instead, Janáček pursued a more dramatic, pantheistic faith, depicted in the tableaux vivants of his setting of the Lord’s Prayer or the decadent incense-clouded poetry of his Věčné evangelium (The Eternal Gospel). Liturgical music was a dead strand in the composer’s output. Having lost two children and living an adulterous life, Janáček was hardly the picture of Catholic propriety. Like many of his Modernist cohort, he rejected the sentimental piety of 19th century belief, preferring the religion of the earth, as celebrated in the eternal cycle of nature in The Cunning Little Vixen.

Across Europe new ideas of belief and spirituality started to grow. Bacchanalian beliefs in Munich’s suburb of Schwabing celebrated matriarchy, Dionysian rites, ancient religion and pagan ritual. Gusto Gräser threw away bourgeois respectability and walked up and down Italy without shoes and a fantastical long beard, while the 'Wandervögel' in the Austrian and German countryside stripped down to nothing and hailed the new age, seekers of truth in an irrational landscape. Even the established religions found new life, not least in the Zionism of Theodr Herzl’s Vienna or the Prague group Bar Kochba. Janáček was no different in rejecting the tradition modes and mores of religion for a freer, broader belief. And like his contemporaries he returned to his roots to find the essence of those beliefs. Recalling a story when he stole timpani for a service at the church in Hukvaldy as a child, or his time as a choral and organ scholar in the Brno monastery, Janáček eventually came back to religion in 1926, seen through a dramatic lens.


As in 1917, when he had met Kamila Stösslová, Janáček spent some of his summer in the spa town at Luhačovice. Having completed the full score of the second act of The Makropulos Case, Janáček began work on a new piece, The Glagolitic Mass. Breaking usual behaviour, he brought the score with him to the spa. Normally he had such a busy social life and timetable of treatments there that composition wasn’t really an option. Yet this year something had stuck with him; it was a meeting he had with the Archbishop of Olomouc in 1921, who whilst criticizing the paucity of religious music in Czechoslovakia, suggested that the composer try his hand at a new setting of the mass. Rather typically, Janáček opted out of a traditional Latin setting, and chose an Old Church Slavonic text. The term ‘Glagolitic’ refers to the original script in which Old Church Slavonic was written. The original words date from the 9th century, and were used in church services on the 7th July, the feast day of St Cyril and St Methodius. Janáček later said in an article printed in his local paper that the piece was inspired by an electrical storm he witnessed whilst on holiday in Luhačovice.

It grows darker and darker. Already I am looking into the black night; flashes of lightning cut through it. I switch on the flickering electric light on the high ceiling. I sketch nothing more than the quiet motive of a desperate frame of mind to the words ‘Gospodi pomiluj’ [Lord have mercy]. Nothing more than the joyous shout ‘Slava, Slava!’ [Glory].

It was there, in Luhačovice that the majority of The Glagolitic Mass was written. Janáček revised the work thoroughly later in the year, and it was first performed in the composer’s adopted hometown of Brno on the 5 December 1927 and in Prague on the 8 April 1928.


The Mass is peppered with Janáček’s customary traits; use of repeated motives, short bursts of lyricism and bizarre, often surprising groupings of instruments within the orchestra. It is a triumphant work (quite apart from Janáček’s own thoughts on religion) and much like his opera The Cunning Little Vixen celebrates life overcoming death. Whether Janáček wanted to or not, he created a piece that echoed the primary teachings of the Christian Church he had chosen to leave behind, but one, he said:

Without the gloom of medieval monastic cells in its motifs,
without a trace of well-worn imitative procedures,
without a trace of fugal, Bachian strettos,
without a trace of Beethovenian pathos,
without Haydn’s playfulness…

To view it as such, however, is to take the work at face value. For when the letters he wrote to Kamila Stösslová were eventually published in 1990, what had seemed a celebratory work revealed itself as deeply personal. Like the timpani solo that comes through, or the wild toccata for organ near the end, both echoing his early life in Hukvaldy and Brno, the ‘meaning’ of this Mass is not necessarily about life after death. It is about life during life. Like all other genres he encountered, with The Glagolitic Mass Janáček made religious music his own. Click here for more information on the Opening Night of the Proms.