'The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace' was composed in the year 2000 by Welshman Karl Jenkins.
Although commissioned by the Royal Armouries Museum it is essentially an anti-war work and as well as using the text of the Latin mass draws on texts from other religions.
Our introduction to this popular modern work is by Brian Kay.
The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace received its première performance at the Royal Albert Hall, London, on 25 April 2000. It has become very popular with choirs.
Jenkins dedicated the Mass to the people of Kosovo who were suffering the ravages of war while he was writing. The work intersperses liturgical mass movements with poetry and prose from around the world to tell the age-old story of going to war and how the horror and loss that inevitably results. It ends with a prayer for a better and more peaceful future.
The librettist for The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace Guy Wilson says the message of the work that “the armed man must be feared” seemed painfully relevant to the 20th-century at the end of which the work was composed.
“The theme is multi-cultural, affecting all humankind. Therefore, we interspersed between the mass movements prose and poetry from around the world to give the work relevance to as many as possible.”
