The Advent season in Brno Opera traditionally includes Bohuslav Martinů's Play about Maria, and now they have been joined by a program dedicated to probably the most popular Christmas work - Rybova's Czech Christmas Mass.
Affectionately nicknamed Rybovka, it was written in 1796 by the Czech composer Jakub Jan Ryba, who also wrote his own Czech text for the mass. Although Ryba respected parts of the Latin musical mass, he actually created a pastoral play about the announcement of Christ's birth and the arrival of the shepherds to the manger, which, thanks to its fresh and joyful melodies, became immediately popular and even today, more than two hundred years after its creation, is an inherent part of the Christmas period. However, Ryb's Mass was not the only one at the time of its creation, one of their predecessors is the charming work of the Moravian cantor Josef Schreier Missa pastoralis in C boemica, also referred to as the Moravian Christmas Mass "Listen, Miko, listen!", which was created sometime around 1755. Schreier's Mass it is actually a series of small pastorals that humorously mix Latin text with texts in the Wallachian dialect, musically it draws heavily from Moravian folk music of the late Baroque and is thus an interesting counterpart to the classic Rybova mass.
