2014 Program Notes, Book 3 45
Friday, June 27 and Saturday, June 28, 2014
GLAGOLITIC MASS
FOR SOLOISTS, CHORUS
AND ORCHESTRA (1926)
Leosˇ Janácˇek (1854-1928)
Janác
ˇ
ek’s
Glagolitic Mass
is scored for two piccolos, two
flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet,
two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, four trumpets, three
trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps, celesta,
organ and strings. The performance time is 40 minutes. The
Grant Park Orchestra has never before performed this early
version of the Mass. The later version of the Mass was first performed at Grant Park
on July 23, 1983, with Zdenek Macal conducting.
“People say that I have achieved something. When now and again I write
something which I know is enjoyed ... in South Bohemia in Písek or in the West in
Plzen or in the North in Mladá Boleslav or in the East or in Moravia or Slovakia, then it
occurs to me that there is something in the power of art after all; that I have plucked
a string which resounds everywhere, which ties us all together so that we feel as
one nation. This is what I value in my own art, and the most important thing is that it
binds us together, that it makes us strong and defiant and proof against everything
in the world. Everything else, the notes, that to me is secondary. If I can unite our
nation which is so irate, so quarrelsome and disunited, if I have done this, then I
feel I have not lived in vain.” With these soaring words of Czechoslovak nationalism
addressed to the crowd that gathered on July 11, 1926 to witness the placing of
an honorary plaque on the house of his birth in Hukvaldy, Moravia, Leoš Janácˇek
stated the philosophy that vitalized his entire creative life. Just two months later,
when he was kept inside his summer house at Luhacovice by a spell of rainy summer
weather, he wrote what many consider the greatest expression of his Czech spirit —
the
Glagolitic Mass.
In 862 A.D., the Moravian Prince Rostislav sent a mission to the Emperor at
Constantinople bearing a request to provide teachers who could speak and write
in the Slavonic language to help him establish Christianity in his country. By the
following year, the brothers Cyril and Methodius had arrived in Moravia from Greece.
Cyril was charged with devising a script for what was, until that time, the spoken
language known as Old Slavonic, and he created the “Glagolitic” alphabet (from
the Old Slavonic word for “word”) to use for his translations of the Bible and other
religious texts. Under pressure from Rome, Glagolitic eventually yielded to Latin
in the Slavic countries, but the script served as the basis for the Cyrillic alphabet
still used in Russia. When Janácˇek was a young chorister at the Queen’s Monastery
in Brno in 1869, he was taken to Velehrad to sing at the millennium observances
of the death of St. Cyril. Later in his life, however, Janácˇek grew strongly opposed
to organized religion (he refused to enter churches “even to get out of the rain....
[They are] the essence of death. Graves under the flagstones, all kinds of torture and
death in the paintings. The rituals, the prayers, the chants — death and death again!
I won’t have anything to do with it!”), and the memory of that sacred childhood
ceremony became for him more a symbol of Czech nationalism than of religious
faith. His setting of Cyril’s ancient Glagolitic text was not therefore an act of piety but
rather one of patriotism.
In 1921, Janácˇek complained to Leopold Precan, the Archbishop of Olomouc,
about the sorry condition of contemporary Czech church music, and the Archbishop
challenged him to write “something worthwhile.” Janácˇek did not want to use the
traditional Latin Mass text (he had already abandoned one attempt at setting those
words in 1908), so he asked Josef Martínek, a student in his class who was also
