The term ‘Glagolitic’ (neo-Lat. glagoliticus, from Croatian glagoljica: ‘the Glagolitic alphabet’; related to Old Church Slavonic glagolŭ, ‘word’) refers to a distinctive alphabet devised for the Slavonic literary language in the 9th century by Constantine (monastic name, Cyril) and Methodius, apostles of the Slavs. By extension it is used to refer to the Catholic (as opposed to Orthodox) Mass translated into Church Slavonic, and to compositions such as the Glagolitic Mass of Leoš Janáček that are settings of such texts, whether written in the original alphabet or transcribed into Latin letters. ‘Glagolitic chant’ or ‘Glagolitic singing’ (glagoljaško pjevanje) refers in a broader sense to a repertory of paraliturgical as well as liturgical Catholic chant in the Slavonic vernacular transmitted orally, principally in Croatia.
In 862 Prince Rostislav requested the Byzantine Emperor to send a Slav-speaking mission to Great Moravia. Accordingly, Cyril and Methodius in 863 established the Catholic liturgy there, and with it a centre for the Catholic faith within the whole of Slavonic Europe. Since that time, in Catholic Slavonic countries, a continuous tradition of the Catholic Slavonic or Glagolitic liturgy has existed side by side with the Latin liturgy of the Western Church, even though subject to some local interruptions. Early sources include fragments of a 10th–11th-century sacramentary at Kiev (UKR-Kan DA/P.328) and fragments of an 11th-century missal, besides several complete late-medieval missals; the Mass Ordinary melodies (‘Věruju’, ‘Svet’, ‘Blagoslovlen’, ‘Agneče Boži’) in a Glagolitic missal of the 14th or 15th century were shown by Vajs (1910, p.436) to be precisely those of the corresponding Latin texts in another missal of the same date and geographical provenance. The privilege of celebrating the Slavonic liturgy has been repeatedly confirmed by the Holy See, for example, at the Council of Trent, up to and including the 20th century. Within this tradition, in turn, some of the areas of south-eastern Europe now falling within Croatia and Slovenia have played a particularly important part, together with the basilica of S Hieronimo in Rome, a centre of the Slavonic liturgy especially since the late 16th century.
Interest in the Glagolitic liturgy received a particular impetus owing to the coincidence of the millennial celebrations for the mission to Moravia of Sts Cyril and Methodius in 1863, those for St Cyril's death in 1869 and so on with the rise of Slavonic nationalism, and the participation in the nationalist movement by Catholic priests such as František Sušil in Moravia. (The 1863 celebration was also marked in Rome, and Liszt composed his ‘Slavimo slavno slaveni!’ for this occasion, to a Croatian rather than Old Slavonic text.) A concordat between the Vatican and Montenegro in 1886 allowed the re-introduction into Slovenia and Bohemia of the Glagolitic rite (against the protests of some ecclesiastics); the edition of the Glagolitic missal that was subsequently authorized for Bohemia and Croatia was the Missale romanum slavonico idiomate (Rome, 1905). Almost immediately, the Glagolitic Mass began to be set also in a modern style: the first such setting by a Czech composer was the Missa glagolskaja by Ladislav Kožušníček (1907), and later settings include the Glagolská mše of J.B. Foerster (1923) besides that of Janáček (1926).
Croatian Glagolitic chant (Glagolitic singing) is attested in a report sent to Rome between 1740 and 1742 by Matej Karaman, bishop of Osor (HR-ZAn 22321, ms.546): in villages the parish priests and lower clergy employed a style of singing ‘without instruments and without learning, composed of a certain natural and affective melody that awakens devotion’ (senza istromenti, e senza studio, composto d'una certa melodia naturale, e patetica, ch'eccita divozione). Transcriptions of specific melodies from this repertory began to appear during the 19th century, and field recordings have been made since the early 20th (the oldest, c1910–30, are preserved in the Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna); the Croatian Academy of Sciences is responsible for collecting and publishing the sources. The repertory has a wide geographical provenance in the northern Adriatic islands, especially Krk, in Istria, and in the Croatian coastal mainland of northern and central Dalmatia; various different regional styles can be distinguished (see the studies by Bezić and Doliner).
SČHK (‘Církevně slovanský zpěv’ [Church Slavonic chant]; J. Brabcová-Bajgarová, J. Fukač); MGG2 (‘Messe, III’; J. Bezić, C. Hannick)
J. Vajs: ‘Etwas über den liturgischen Gesang der Glagoliten der vor- und nachtridentinischen Epoche’, Archiv für slavische Philologie, xxx (1909), 227–33; xxxi (1910), 430–42
V. Žganec: ‘Folklore Elements in the Yugoslav Orthodox and Roman Catholic Liturgical Chant’, JIFMC, viii (1956), 19–22
J. Bezić: Razvoj i oblici glagoljaškog pjevanja u sjevernoj Dalmaciji [The development and features of Glagolitic chant in northern Dalmatia] (diss., U. of Ljubljana, 1969)
J. Bezić: ‘Glagoljaško pjevanje’ [Glagolitic chant], Muzička enciklopedija, i (Zagreb, 1971), 686–7
J. Martinić: Glagolitische Gesänge Mitteldalmatiens (Regensburg, 1981)
G. Doliner: ‘Historical Data about the “Glagolitic Chant” in the Area of Istria’, IMSCR XIV: Bologna 1987, iii, 555–8
P. Wingfield: Janáček: Glagolitic Mass (Cambridge, 1992)
G. Doliner: ‘Glagolitic Singing in the Light of Certain New Data on Music Culture in Novi Vinodolski’, Narodna umjetnost, xxxii (1995), 1, 183–200
J. Bezić: ‘Glagoljaško pjevanje’ [Glagolitic chant], Hrvatska i Europa: kultura, znanost i umjetnost [Croatia and Europe: culture, science, art], ed. I. Supičić (Zagreb, 1997), 569–76
G. Doliner: ‘Glagoljaško pjevanje kao dio fenomena glagoljaštva’ [Glagolitic chant as an element of the Glagolitic tradition], Glazba, riječi i slike: svečani zbornik za Koraljku Kos [Music, words and images: essays in honour of Koraljka Kos] (Zagreb, 1999), 361–8
GEOFFREY CHEW