 Ryelandt’s national and international reputation was made primarily by his five great oratorios, which were all performed in Belgium, and some also in The Netherlands, France, and Canada.A true, full-fledged oratorio that he wrote but destroyed deserves explicit mention, "De XIV stonden", literally ‘The fourteen hours’, meaning the fourteen Stations of the Cross, because it was set to a text written for the purpose by Guido Gezelle.Yet Ryelandt was unhappy with Gezelle’s libretto, for Gezelle, "like many men of letters, understood nothing of music, even though he sometimes put a lot of it in his verse."