Smyth composed the Mass following a renewal of her High Anglican belief,[1] stimulated by reading a copy of The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis, while she was ill in Munich on Christmas Eve 1889.
[11] George Bernard Shaw wrote that the Mass was a sign of the rise of woman composers, though he called the work "the light literature of church music".
[1] She turned to opera, following the advice of conductor Hermann Levi, who praised her aptitude for dramatic composition when she showed him the Mass in Munich.
[3] After composing her first opera, Fantasio, she travelled around Europe during the mid-1890s seeking to arrange a premiere for it, and also a further performance of the Mass.
[20] In 1934 a performance of the Mass conducted by Thomas Beecham, attended by Queen Mary, was the culmination of the Festival Concerts celebrating Smyth's 75th birthday.
The Mass in D Australian premiere was performed on the 9th of October 2022, by the Camberwell Chorale, conducted by Douglas Heywood OAM.
[24] According to musicologist Donald Tovey, the joyful mood sustained in the Gloria[25] is an example of the close attention which Smyth paid to matching the music to the religious meaning of every part of each movement's text.
[9] The Gloria starts with an orchestral outburst and then a change in time signature at "et in terra pax", where what Tovey calls a "radiant melody"[25] is taken up first by the tenor solo and then by the other parts.