Excuse my ignorance but before my recent trip to Slovakia, I had never Heard of Czech composer Leos Janáçek, contemporary of Antonín Dvořák and Bedřich Smetana. His most famous opera is Jenůfa, which was premiered in 1904, but he is also known for his folkloristic research and studies as a music theorist.
However, the reason for this entry is not his musical talent but his letters. These are the letters of a great love story. In 1917, the Czech composer met Kamila Stösslová while on holiday at Luhaçovice, a spa resort in Moravia. He was sixty-three and locked in a loveless marriage; she was twenty-six, a woman of striking good looks, the wife of an antique dealer frequently away from home.
After the holiday, Janáçek began writing to Stösslová in what she considered an extravagant prose. She showed no interest in his work and answered with a very matter-of-factly style, in spasmodic replies, most of which Janáçek burned at her request. However, he continued to send her some 700 letters with very occasinal meetings until his death eleven years later. Kamila became his fantasy lover, his grand passion, and the inspiration for some of his greatest music, including his famous Second String Quartet. He inscribed it first "Love Letters", and then "Intimate Pages". As Janácek wrote to her: "In every work of mine there is at least a shadow of your soul..." and, capturing something of beauty he saw in her, "every note will be your dark eye."
(Click here if you would like to listen to an NPR podcast discussing the importance of this piece)
Janáçek had been married for 36 years to Zdenka Schulzová, one of his pupils at the Brno's Teachers Institute. Zdenka wrote about Kamila: "I thought she was quite nice: young, cheerful, one could have a really good talk with her, she was always laughing." She felt the couple "brought action and laughter into our sad quietness."
As for Leos Janáçek, he did, at least, know what it meant to be in love. On March 28, 1928, a few months before his death, he wrote to Kamila:
"Well, love is a wizard. Submit to it faithfully and it gives a person joy. It intoxicates, it envelops, it isolates. It creates fragrance in the air, ardor from coldness, it beautifies everything around it."
Most of these letters were suppressed until changing conditions in Czechoslovakia allowed their full publication in 1990. John Tyrrell edited and translated a comprehensive selection, concentrating on the almost daily letters of the final eighteen months, and including a selection of mostly unknown photographs in the book Intimate Letters: Leos Janáçek to Kamila Stösslová
If the letters are sometimes so intimate that to read them feels like voyeurism, the fact is that Janáçek as never unmindful of the chance that they might find their way into other hands. He seems to have regarded them as acts of amorous bravado, like carving lovers' hearts on trees. 'I always think to myself,' he writes in October 1927, 'will some inquisitive person spy on this daily correspondence? And (yet) it's only my conversation with you - when mountains divide us. A conversation without which I couldn't exist.'
Well, I have just ordered the book by John Tyrrell and can't wait to read their "conversations".
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