Mass in E Flat (Unfinished) - Leoš Janácek (1854—1928)
1. Kyrie
2. Credo
3. Agnus Dei
Janácek lived a tragic life, suffering from depression and continuous self-doubt. He found himself trapped in a marriage of convenience and both of his children died young. For most of his musical life he existed in obscurity and only when he was in his fifties did he start to receive any kind of recognition as a composer. He gave up composing altogether for a period in the 1880s and left many works incomplete when he died in 1928.
The composer was notorious for starting pieces of music but not finishing them or returning to them many years after the initial ideas were composed. He wrote his unfinished Mass in 1907/8, dictating it to his composition pupils at the Brno Organ School as a model exercise for setting Latin sacred texts in the missa brevis style. He completed a Kyrie, an Agnus Dei and nearly two-thirds of a Credo before setting the work to one side. Characteristically, he returned to it nearly twenty years later, incorporating most of it - now with an Old Church Slavonic text - into his first draft of the Glagolitic Mass (1926-27), which we now consider a masterpiece of the choral oeuvre. Subsequent revisions of the Glagolitic Mass removed almost all references from the earlier work, the score of which Janácek appears to have destroyed. Fortunately, the incomplete E Flat Mass was preserved, partly through the initiative of a resourceful Janácek pupil, Vilém Petrželka (1889-1967). In 1942, 14 years after Janácek's death, Petrželka reconstructed the work from the transcripts he and fellow pupils had made in 1908. He also completed the Credo, but in a style far less adventurous and individual than Janácek's own.
An atheist, Janácek left behind a distinct lack of church music. The Glagolitic Mass is considered a mass only in name and although it clearly presents humanist themes and concerns it is more of a concert work rather than a work intended for liturgical use. The unfinished mass could be considered more of a sketch rather than a complete work. However, although brief, there is an odd 'completeness' to the movements we hear tonight. The three movements are bound by Janácek's individual approach to word setting, often placing the wrong syllable on the strongest beat of the bar, creating a slightly disorientating sensation. This is enhanced further in the Agnus Dei where the organ plays a series of triplets, alternating between a two note pattern, thus creating a high degree of rhythmic uncertainty that permeates the work as a whole.
