The inspiration for Janáček’s unique Glagolitic Mass was, according to one of his pupils, the dire state of church music in and around his native village of Hukvaldy. The composer himself claimed that the piece was actually inspired by an electrical storm he witnessed while on holiday in Luhačovice. In any case, when he turned back to sacred music in 1921, Janáček would draw upon an old Latin mass setting he had begun in 1908. But now the much older, atheistic, and fiercely patriotic composer eschewed traditional Latin and opted a text in the Old Church Slavonic of ninth-century missionaries; the entire work became evocative of Janáček’s s beloved Moravia and was infused with his broader Slavic preoccupations, as much pagan is it is Catholic.