BIBLIOGRAPHY



“My Dear Dark Dove”: Leoš Janáček’s Correspondence with Kamila

Stösslová as Inspiration for Later Musical Masterpieces

It began as innocently as the opening bars of a Janáček opera – an aging composer spends a few weeks each summer at a Moravian spa named Luhačovice, to clear his mind for musical composition, as well as to escape, if only briefly, from an increasingly unhappy marriage. The composer in question is Leoš Janáček (1854-1928), and the year in question is 1917, in the fourth year of the terrible fratricidal European War that would give birth to the Czech and Slovak nation which he so fervently desired. During this particular “season” at Luhačovice, the unanticipated occurs -- Janáček the composer, then in his 63rd year, unhappily married, meets for the first time a dark-haired woman, then in her 25th year, happily married to an antique dealer and the mother of two young sons. Her name, Kamila Stösslová, her ethnic background, Jewish. She sat down on the grass “like an exhausted little bird who doesn’t yet know how to fly” (Janáček, Letter 320, [6 June 1925], p. 72), as the composer later recalled. The meeting occurred on 3 July 1917. On 16 July the composer sent her the first of more than 700 letters and notes which were to follow in dizzying succession until his death in August 1928. In his first letter, Janáček wrote:

Dear Madam: Accept these few roses as a token of my unbounded esteem for you …You will not believe how glad I am that I have met you! Happy you! All the more painfully I feel my own desolation and bitter fate. Always think well of me – just as you will always stay in my memory. Heartily devoted to you. Leoš Janáček (Janáček, Letter 1 [16 July 1917], p. 3).

Janáček’s long-suffering wife Zdenka Schultzová, whom he had married when she was but sixteen, later recounted in her own autobiography in 1935 how delighted she had been with this her husband’s latest infatuation. Twice they had come close to divorcing but had pulled back from the brink at the last moment. In 1916 the composer’s first major operatic success, Jenufa, had occurred in Prague, and Janáček had fallen in love with the Croation-born singer who portrayed the wicked stepmother Kostelnička, Gabriela Horvátová. As Zdenka delicately expressed herself in her autobiography: “My instinct clearly told me: Mrs. Horvátová has fallen off his shovel, now this one takes over” (Janáček, p. 6). Initially, Zdenka welcomed Kamila, since the Stössls obviously were a happily married couple who “really love one another” (Janáček, p. 6).

Our knowledge of this fascinating eleven-year correspondence is due in large measure to the meandering bypaths of recent Czech history. According to prior agreement, the composer destroyed most of Mrs. Stösslová’s letters to him (much as Johannes Brahms had carried out his promise to Clara Schumann by throwing her letters into the Rhine). But, like Clara Schumann, Kamila Stösslová actually kept most of the letters addressed to her, until her rather untimely demise in 1935. At the the outbreak of World War II, her husband fled to Switzerland, and a Czech professor acquired the letters for the Massaryk University Archives in Brno. Pious concern for the memory of Janáček’s widow Zdenka, who died in 1938, kept the letters a subject of taboo, and they remained at the university under restricted access. In 1990 Dr. Svatava Přibánová, the chief Janáček scholar of the Moravian Regional Museum’s Music Division, was able to publish the letters in their entirety in the original Czech. A Princeton musicologist, John Tyrrell, received permission to translate and publish the entire correspondence in English in 1994. As a result, we can now pinpoint the direct inspiration of Kamila for at least a half dozen of the composer’s later musical masterpieces and thus place his life into proper perspective. Prof. Tyrrell rightly calls these letters “the most beautiful and self-revealing ever written by Janáček. He was always a gifted and imaginative letter writer, but these letters go to the heart of his inner life. And within them, they contain a great love story” (Tyrrell, p. xi). In his introduction to the first English edition of the correspondence, published in 1994, Prof. Tyrrell noted that Stösslová herself exercised considerable editorial license with the composer’s letters to her. We know that she burned at least ten of them, possibly as many as thirty-two, since she left the empty envelopes as proof of their former existence (Tyrrell, p. xiii; Zemanová, p. 264). Some items she tore out with a scissors, or she blotted out particular words. Her own letters, including most of them from the later years, were burned by Janáček on her instructions, and he frequently, even tearfully, chronicled the burning of each of these treasures. According to Prof. Tyrrell, Kamila’s letters “are [those] of a poorly educated woman, not used to expressing herself in writing” (Tyrrell, p. xv).

However, I would argue that a closer analysis of the published correspondence between “the Maestro,” as Kamila often addressed him, and his “dear little Negress” or “my dear dark dove,” as he once called her, tells a far different tale. Kamila’s first contribution as Janáček’s muse occurred very soon in their relationship. On 10 August 1917, the composer wrote from Brno that he was working on some “beautiful little poems about that gypsy love” with “a tiny bit of the Luhačovice mood” (Janáček, Letter 6 [10 August 1917], p. 6). The composition on which he was then working, The Diary of One Who Vanished [Zápisník zmiezelého], consists of twenty-three poems about an uneducated peasant who enters into a romance with a gypsy girl, has a child with her, and then joins her gypsy family. They were based on two anonymous articles published in May 1916 in a popular Brno newspaper, the Lidové noviny. But the project soon encountered obstacles. On 2 September 1918, Janáček wrote: “It’s too bad my gypsy girl can’t be called something like Kamila. That’s also why I don’t want to go on with the piece” (Janáček, Letter 82 [2 September 1918], p. 23).

But “go on” he did, and on 18 April 1921, The Diary successfully premiered in Brno. In autumn it was published with the cover at first intended to show Kamila with her hair flowing loose. Janáček clearly identified Kamila with the gypsy enchantress of the story when he confessed in 1924: “And that black gypsy girl in my Diary of One who Vanished, that was especially you” (Zemanová, Letter dated 24 July 1924, p. 154). But when she was invited to the Prague premiere in the fall of 1921, Kamila refused to come unless Janáček’s wife or her own husband could also be present (Zemanová, p. 155).

Now Janáček had a new artistic inspiration, from February 1920 – a Russian play, The Thunderstorm, written in 1859 by the Russian playwright A.N. Ostrovsky (1823-1886). The resulting opera, inspired by the heroine of Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly, and named for the opera’s tragic leading soprano, Kát’a Kabanova, soon took on the personality of Kamila: “Your despair poured into my vision of Kát’a Kabanová,” he confessed in 1928, and on the title page of the vocal score which he gave her in that same year, he reported a conversation with a friend many years before – like a “miracle,” Kamila had always been on his mind: “My Kát’a grows in her,” he wrote, “in her, in Kamila. It will be one of my most tender works” (Zemanová, p. 164). In the title role, Janáček provides a tragic and sympathetic psychological portrait of a repressed woman living in Czarist Russia, even as his own domestic life experienced yet another upheaval directly related to his continuing relationship with Kamila. Janáček resolved that the royalties from five months of Kát’a, 240 Czech crowns, should go to Kamila, even as his wife Zdenka began to hate Kamila as a “clever businesswoman” (Zemanová, p. 233).

Later, on 24 July 1924, Janáček reported to Kamila that his opera Kát’a was to be given in Plžn: “And Kát’a, you know, that was you beside me. And that black gypsy girl in my Diary of One Who Vanished – that was especially you even more. That’s why there’s such heat in these works. So much heat that if it caught both of us, there’d just be ashes left of us. Luckily, it’s just I who burn – and you who are saved” (Janáček, Letter 243 [15 July 1924], p. 53).

Janáček’s next opera, The Cunning Little Vixen [Přihody Lišky Bystroušky] was based on a series of drawings by Stanislav Lolek (1873-1936) which were serialized in the Brno paper Lidové noviny. Composed between 1922 and 1923, the opera describes the life of a vixen cub who is caught by the Forester and raised by him until she escapes, mates, raises a family of her own, and dies at the hand of a hunter. Human characters are superimposed on self-renewing nature. In February 1922 Janáček described this strange new opera to Kamila, calling it “a merry thing with a sad end: and I’m taking a place at that sad end myself … And so I belong there” (Janáček, Letter 193 [10 February 1922], p. 37).

Kamila, meanwhile, was angry with her “maestro” and did not respond for a long while because of a comment which Janáček had made about her supposed fickleness. She played hard to get, reminding him that “There’s no love between us, just innocent friendship.” But then she added wistfully: “My husband’s away all the time, he’s always got things to do” (Janáček, Letter dated 25 August 1922, p. 38-39). Thus Kamila played the “cunning vixen” to Janáček’s romantic fox, and this bound him to her even tighter. He now wrote to her: “In every work of mine, there is at least a shadow of yourself.”

From 1924 on, Janáček’s letters to Kamila become more insistent and take on an unmistakable erotic coloring. At the end of June 1924, Kamila invited the composer to spend three days at her home in Pišek, Southern Bohemia, but always in the presence of her husband. With her “raven black hair,” her spontaneity and vitality, Kamila now held Janáček spellbound. His letters now became open declarations of love: “How can one not want you when one loves you,” he wrote plaintively on 15 July 1924. In that same letter, he expressed bitter frustration: “You know, we dream about paradise, about heaven, and we never get to it. So I dream about you and I know that you’re the unattainable sky … You are entire in my soul; so it’s enough for me to want you always. And to forget you would be sad for me, and it’s impossible” (Janáček, Letter 243 [15 July 1924], p. 52).

In December 1925, he told Kamila about a new opera that he was finishing after three years of hard work – The Makropulos Affair [Vĕc Makropulos]. Based on a play by Karel Čapek, it concerns a famous diva, Elina Makropulos, the daughter of a Prague physician who tries out an elixir to grant eternal life on his own daughter. The sixteen-year-old Elina then lives 337 more years under an array of names, all using the same initials, E.M. As for Kamila’s role in inspiring this operatic heroine, Janáček was rather upset with her at the time. He wrote to her on 28 January 1927: “I think that for me you’ll turn into that ‘icy one.’ You’re poor Elina Makropulos” (Janáček, Letter 422 [28 January 1927], p. 98).

Well over half of Janáček’s correspondence with Kamila dates from the last years of his life. They became increasingly erotic – he dreams that Kamila has become his wife, and he compliments her accordingly: “Hands, breasts, your whole body ripples so beautifully too” (Janáček, Letter 503 [2 October 1927], p. 137). He began signing his letters: “Yours, only yours and for ever” (Janáček, Letter 503 [2 October 1927], p. 137).

In his letters from 1927/1928, the composer refers to Kamila frequently as his wife (Zemanová, p. 228). Thus he describes to Kamila a nuptual mass in the cathedral of his imagination: “And that cathedral is high – It reaches right up to the vault of the sky. And the candles that burn there, they are the tall pine trees, and at the top they have lighted stars. And the bells in the cathedral, they’re from the flock of sheep … Into that cathedral two people enter … And these two want to be married … So, priest, come at last! Nightingales, thrushes, ducks, geese make music! For their general now wants to marry that little Negress, that small tender – that dear Kamila” (Janáček, Letter 523 [24/25 November 1927], p. 152-153).

On 1 February 1928, now writing to Kamila at least once a day, Janáček reported that he was working on a string quartet, his second, to be called Intimate Letters: “They’ll be little fires in my soul, and they’ll set it ablaze with the most beautiful melodies. Just think. The first movement I did already in Hukvaldy. The impression when I saw you for the first time” (Janáček, Letter 576 [1 February 1928], p. 196). On 18/19 May 1928 he added: “This piece, Intimate Letters, was written in fire. Earlier pieces only in hot ash” (Janáček, Letter 659 [18/19 May 1928], p. 282). As for his last opera, From the House of the Dead [Z mrtvého domu], Janáček wrote Kamila on 8 June 1927: “You’re in my latest work as the lovable Aljeja” (Janáček, Letter 456 [8 June 1927], p. 121).

The final days of Janáček’s life – and thus of this romance – are confused and contradictory. Kamila finally agreed to spend part of the summer with Janáček at the Luhačovice spa, but her mother took deathly ill and died on 17 July 1928. Two weeks later, Kamila finally came to Hukvaldy, with her husband and son Otto, leaving a furious Zdenka Schultzová behind in Brno. Janáček caught a chill, possibly while looking in vain for her son Otto in the damp woods. The composer died on 12 August 1928, leaving the two leading ladies in his tangled love life to pick up the pieces as best they could. This they proceeded to do in a most acrimonious and mutually insulting manner. Unfortunately, we have no time to pursue that issue at this moment.

What are admirers of Janáček’s music to make of this strange ménage à trois in Moravia’s forests and meadows? Mirka Zemanová, in her fine new biography, entitled simply Janáček, published in 2002, draws a comparison with the Italian poet Petrarch’s relationship with his Laura some 500 years earlier. Laura was also a virtuous married woman for whom Petrarch sought to sublimate the sexual nature of his obsession. Just as Petrarch’s unrequited passion heightened his creativity, so Zemanová sees in Janáček’s feelings for Kamila a continuation of this Petrarchan tradition of courtly love.

My concluding observation, however, will be a more cautious one. Some critics have portrayed Kamila as a destroyer of Janáček’s marriage and family life. But an unbiased reading of these letters and several recent Janáček biographies is enough to dismiss such a notion. Janáček’s marriage with Zdenka was already shriveling on the vine when he met Kamila that fateful summer of 1917 in Luhačovice. Several separations and near divorces, the tragic death of their daughter Olga at the age of twenty, and the composer’s bitter feud with his father-in-law quickly lay bare for us the raw emotional friction in the Janáček household long before 1917.

Rather than condemn Kamila as a thoughtless home-wrecker, I would like to rehabilitate her sullied reputation by drawing attention to the emiment practicality and good sense which she displayed throughout her eleven-year relationship with the composer. Simple and poorly educated though she may have been, Kamila never succumbed to Janáček’s eroticized self-pity or his transparent sexual blandishments. She was always scrupulously careful that her husband, her sons, even his longsuffering wife Zdenka Schultzová, were with her in the composer’s company. And when Janáček stepped over the line, as he appears to have done on 5 March 1928, she firmly rebuked him. Janáček had invited her to come alone to Hukvaldy, to stay in the guest room which he had constructed upstairs especially for her. But Kamila responded: “It cut me to the quick when you wrote that your wife suffers on my account. Perhaps she too could be given a little love … But she is your wife and has claim on everything. What can your wife think when you say that we are bound together? Do you know what that means? … It’s all the same to you even if you wound [other people]” (Zemanová, Letter dated 5 March 1928], p. 237).

And what are we to make of the contradiction that even as Janáček was sympathetically portraying downtrodden women in his operas, he seems to have treated all the women whom he held dear to him with insulting condescension, even occasional hostility – arguing that, as an artist, he required his freedom?

In the end, we are left only with more unanswered questions. Arguably, in her own uniquely practical handling of her difficult, imperious suitor, Kamila Stösslová seems to have been the perfect muse to inspire Leoš Janáček’s late musical masterpieces. For by holding him at arm’s length, she forced him to sublimate his feelings for her into ever-more sublime music. In the end, we may even conclude that the composer’s most intriguing female operatic figure, the Cunning Little Vixen – Liška Bystrouška – Das Schlaue Füchslein, ultimately met her match – in the unassuming but beguiling Kamila Stösslová, the muse responsible for at least a half dozen operatic masterpieces of the early twentieth century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Monographs

Ewans, Michael. Janáček’s Tragic Operas. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1977.

Hollander, Hans. Leoš Janáček: His Life and Work. Translated by Paul Hamburger. London: John Calder, 1963.

Janáček, Leoš. Intimate Letters: Leoš Janáček to Kamila Stösslová. Ed. and translated by John Tyrrell.

Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Janáček and His World. Ed. by Michael Beckerman. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Susskind, Charles. Janáček and Brod. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985.

Tyrrell, John. Janáček’s Operas: A Documentary Account. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Vogel, Jaroslav. Leoš Janáček: A Biography. Rev. and ed. by Karel Janovický. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1981.

Zemanová, Mirka. Janáček. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002.

Dr. Louis J. Reith

Georgetown University Library

Washington, D.C., USA

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