Staged in the Czech original with Czech and English subtitles.

The Miracles of Mary by Bohuslav Martinů is traditionally performed during Advent, and from the 2020/21 season it will be joined by a programme devoted to what is probably the most popular Christmas work – Ryba´s Czech Christmas Mass. This piece, lovingly nicknamed the Rybovka, was created in 1796 by the Czech composer Jan Jakub Ryba, who also wrote his own text for the mass. Even though Ryba respected parts of the Latin musical mass, he created a pastoral play about the proclamation of the birth of Christ and the arrival of the shepherds at the manger. Thanks to its fresh and joyful melodies, his work immediately became popular and even today, more than two hundred years since its creation, it is an inseparable part of the Christmas period. However, Ryba´s mass wasn´t the only one to emerge at the time when it was created – one of its predecessors is a charming work from around 1755 by a Moravian teacher named Josef Schreier, Missa Pastoralis in C boemica, which is also performed as the Moravian Christmas Mass “Čuj, Miko, čuj!”. Schreier´s Mass is, in fact, a series of small pastorals with a witty mix of Latin text and texts in the Wallachian dialect. Musically speaking, it takes a lot from the Moravian folk music of the late Baroque and thus is an interesting counterpart to Ryba´s classicistic mass.