Composition
The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace was commissioned from Karl Jenkins (b. 1944) by the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds to mark the millennium, and dedicated to the victims of Kosovo. Jenkins - a Welsh composer whose career spanned progressive rock (Soft Machine) and neo-classical crossover music - set a text that weaves the traditional Latin Mass with texts from the Mahabharata, the Quran, Kipling's "Danny Deever," and Tennyson, creating a consciously cross-cultural peace statement. Premiered in April 2000 at the Royal Albert Hall, the work became one of the most frequently performed large-scale choral works of the past twenty-five years.
Biblical Text
Revelation 21:4 - "He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away" - is the work's eschatological horizon. The penultimate movement "Now the Guns Have Stopped" and the final "Benedictus" use this text as the promise that gives the work's meditation on war and suffering its resolution.
Matthew 5:9 - "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God" - is woven into the "Benedictus," connecting the beatitude for peacemakers to the traditional eucharistic blessing of the Mass's Sanctus/Benedictus movement. Isaiah 53:4-5 - "Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering" - underlies the Kyrie's petition for mercy in the context of warfare's suffering.
Creator and Legacy
Jenkins's cross-cultural approach to the Mass - including Quranic text alongside the Latin Ordinary - was deliberately ecumenical. The work's dedication to Kosovo victims and its premiere in the year of the Srebrenica war crimes trials gave it a political specificity that distinguished it from more aesthetically driven sacred works. It has been performed in memorial services for victims of wars from Kosovo to Afghanistan to Iraq, and its combination of accessible musical language and genuine theological engagement with suffering has made it one of the defining large-scale sacred works of its generation.