Intimate Letters: Leoš Janáček to Kamila Stösslová is a generous selection from Janác’ek’s letters to his Immortal Beloved, along with a few of her replies. Slogging through these billets doux-amers is not always easy. But once read, they are a rewarding subject for extensive speculation about the role romantic love plays in an artist’s creativity, and about whether sustained passion in anyone’s life depends on its remaining unconsummated.
For eleven years the great Czechoslovak composer loved, adored, and panted for the much younger Kamila Stösslová. They met at the Luhacovice spa in 1917, when he was sixty-three and she twenty-six, and were parted only by his death in 1928. Both were married, and never seem to have come close to being what we today mean by “lovers.” Yet Kamila, too, felt something genuine for Leos, while he kept dreaming of their future marriage and children. Kamila had two boys by her husband, David, an antiques dealer; Janácek and his wife, Zdenka, had lost both their children, after which their marriage, never all that good, completely deteriorated. The Stössel marriage is harder to assess.
David and Kamila were both Jewish, and very middle-class; their puritanical background and socially insecure position would have made them cling to each other that much more stubbornly. The young Kamila was in love with her husband, though his always being away on business trips made that love turn sour. Yet there is no evidence that she would ever have divorced him