Leos Janácek to Kamila Stösslová
    The famous Czech composer Leos Janácek met Kamila Stösslová in July 1917 at the spa town of Luhacovice, where she was staying with her husband, David Stössel. Janácek was then 63, while Kamila--a woman of striking good looks--was only 25 years old. Kamila became his fantasy lover, his grand passion, and the inspiration for some of his greatest music. She was also an outlet for all his repressed anxieties and hopes. In the last 12 years of his life he wrote her some 700 letters, including the one extracted here, written the year before he died and encapsulating his feelings for her. Kamila, in turn, wrote him only occasional letters, most of which Janácek burned at her request. Her initial cool detachment gradually developed into a warm acceptance of a love she never fully understood.
    After his meeting with Kamila, Janácek excitedly told his wife, Zdenka-to whom he had been married for 36 years--about he couple he had just met. In Zdenka's autobiography My Life (1935) she recorded that he said at the time,

"...they really love one another."
Zdenka was at first pleased with his new friendship and saw it as a safe distraction for her husband. Kamila--a happily married woman, and mother of two boys--posed no threat to her. Besides, when Zdenka met her in August, she liked her. In her autobiography, she recalled:

"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."
David Stössel was also pleased by the new friendship, proud to have the famous composer as a family friend.
    In the beginning of their friendship, Leos and Kamila met occasionally and exchanged letters from their homes at opposite ends of the country. The artlessness in Kamila that made Zdenka smile more and more entranced Janácek. She did not try to attract him, nor did she want to. She knew that even their "innocent friendship" might upset Zdenka. By September 30, 1922, Janácek's feelings for Kamila had intensified. He wrote:

"I'm so glad that we've said openly to one another that we're friends. It's an ideal friendship and I'm so glad that it's so pure and elevated above everything bad...You don't know how sad it would be for me without you--although sometimes I don't see you for years!"
    In June 1924, after staying with the Stössels for what he described as

"three beautiful days without a shadow,"
Janácek wrote to Kamila:

"And do you know what else makes me glad? That once again I saw your raven-black hair, all loose, your bare foot: and you are beautiful, wonderfully beautiful...And your eye has a strange depth, it's so deep that it doesn't shine. But it's more attractive: as if it wanted to embrace...Kamila if it weren't for you I wouldn't want to live. It's just an alliance of our souls which binds us."
The following month, on July 9, Kamila replied to his extravagant prose. Poorly educated, she was not used to expressing herself in writing, and her spelling and punctuation often went awry. She wrote matter-of-factly, with none of Janácek's mystical quality. Having long resisted being drawn into a relationship that existed largely in Janácek's imagination, she finally relented:

"I write a bit sadly but I've read your letters and so I sense that love of yours for me. Where I'm sorry is if someone is suffering...So be terribly cheerful because that's what I wish. For it's beautiful that you have these memories of me that's enough for you...I never thought I'd correspond with some man and I resisted even you...But fate wanted otherwise so we'll now leave everything to fate. It's better that you're so old now, if you were young my husband would never permit this..."
Janácek was quite clear about the limits beyond with they could not go. He wrote in reply:

"But I know, don't I, that I'll never have you. Would I pluck that flower, that family happiness of yours, would I make free with my respect for you whom I honor like no other woman on earth?...So I dream about you and I know that you're the unattainable sky."
    In March 1927 Zdenka suggested that Janácek should stay with the Stõssels while their own house was being painted. After the few days spent with them, he wrote Kamila the passionate letter printed her, which shows their "affair" at its height. Many more letters passed between them and they met occasionally, but not until August 1927 did they finally kiss. At times there was a strong strand of delusion in Janácek's passion. He thought of Kamila as his "wife", and even imagined that she was pregnant, though in fact she was just putting on weight as she got older. Inspired by Kamila, Janácek--by then in his mid-seventies--wrote some of his most powerful 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."\
Kamila, baffled by his feelings, was concerned not to hurt Zdenka. On March 5, 1928, she wrote to him:

"It pains me how you wrote that your wife is suffering on my account perhaps you could devote a little love toward her too...I make no claims on anything. But she's your wife and she has claims on everything..."
Leos Janácek 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."
It was Kamila--his great love and muse--and not his wife, who was with him when he died.





Text from
Famous Love Letters
Messages of Intimacy and Passion
Edited by Ronald Tamplin