Every year it was customary for Janáček to spend a few weeks in the Moravian spa town of Luhačovice. There he took the waters and strolled through the countryside. His opera Osud is set there, and it recalls much of the cosmopolitan holiday atmosphere of the place in the opening of the first act. In the summer of 1917 Janáček was enjoying great popularity, as Jenůfa had finally been heard in Prague. Something more important happened at the spa town however, as it was there that he met Kamila Stösslová, the young wife of an antique dealer from Písek, who greatly influenced the composer’s last period of productivity. Janáček was twice her age yet became utterly infatuated with her. Their relationship is detailed extensively in their correspondence of more than seven hundred letters. Many of Stösslová’s letters were burnt by Janáček, but the large majority of his to her survived. Until recently this exchange of letters was in an archive. In 1990 the Brno-based Janáček scholar Svatava Přibáňová produced a Czech edition of the letters, Hádanka života: dopisy Leoše Janáčka Kamile Stösslové, which was translated by John Tyrrell into English and published as Intimate Letters: Leoš Janáček to Kamila Stösslová, Faber, 1994.

Throughout their communications Janáček mentioned his work and often told Stösslová that she was the influence for the work at hand. Very shortly after the composer’s visit to Luhačovice in July 1917 he started composing the setting of the poem’s ‘from the pen of a self-taught man’ printed in the local paper, which told the story of a farm boy’s sexual infatuation with a gypsy girl. These poems became the song cycle Zápisník zmizelého [A Diary of One who disappeared]. Janáček wrote to Kamila saying that,

Indeed he went on to write further that ‘the black Gypsy girl in my Diary – that was especially you’. As soon as the final revision of the work was completed Janáček started work on the next ‘Kamila’ work, his opera Kát'a Kabanová. Again the influence of his love for Stösslová was clearly stated in his series of letters to her on the subject. He wrote that he ‘always placed [her] image on Kát'a Kabanová when [he] was writing the opera’, and when it was finished he told her that ‘you know it’s your work’. In fact throughout their correspondence, and as Janáček finished Kát’a and moved onto the Vixen, and Emilia in Vĕc Makropulos he drew parallels with their characters and that of Kamila. But as John Tyrrell writes in his introduction to the English edition of the letters that although they are ‘the most important source for the understanding of Janáček’s emotional and creative life in the last twelve years’, apart from their musicological significance ‘they contain a great love story’.

Their story was not always happy. As with Janáček’s obsession with Kamila Urválková and his affair with Gabriela Horvátová (the Kostelnička for the Prague premiere of Jenůfa) there were recriminations at home, and his dealings with his wife became increasingly strained. The relationship with Stösslová was never consummated however, and sometimes her lack of ability in replying to the composer’s letters caused him great upset. That apart, she was the woman who influenced the composer more than anyone or anything else. More often than not the warmth that he felt towards her found its way into the amazingly humanitarian works of his last period of composition, and the following letters (only very brief extracts from John Tyrrell's magisterial English edition of Svatava Přibáňová's Czech edition) hint at the mystery and beauty the composer obviously felt were lying within this simple Jewess from Bohemia.


Quotes from Janáček's letters to Kamila Stösslová

John Tyrrell's translation of their letters, Intimate Letters, which is published by Faber is now out of print, but copies can be obtained via the link on the Bibliography page.


The first extract is the first letter Janáček wrote to her

'Luhačovice, 16 July 1917

Dear Madam,

Accept these few roses as a token of my unbounded esteem for you. You are so lovely in character and appearance that in your company one's spirits are lifted; you breathe warm-heartedness, you look on the world with such kindness that one wants to do only good and pleasant things for you in return. 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 also wrote to Stösslová about the pieces he was working on:

‘[…] After unusually hard work I have finished my latest opera. I don’t know whether they will call it The Thunderstorm or Katĕrina. Against The Thunderstorm is the argument that another opera of that name already exists; against Katĕrina that I write nothing but ‘female’ operas. Jenůfa – Katĕrina. The best thing, instead of a title would be to have three asterisks.’

‘I’ve just come from the theatre. They gave Batrflay, one of the most beautiful and saddest of operas. I had you constantly before my eyes. Batrflay is also small, with black hair.’

‘[…] I have begun writing a new opera. The chief character in it is a woman, gentle by nature. She shrinks at the mere thought; a breeze would carry her away – let alone the storm that gathers over her.’

‘That woman – the 337-year-old beauty [-] didn’t have a heart any more. That’s bad.’


Frequently Janáček was melancholic and desperate in his tone:

‘Luhačovice, 1 July 1928, at night

My dear Kamila

And sadness waited for me in that place where you were hidden last year. I walked about the spa along the out-of-the-way paths. I took my white cap as a hat and went at once to that deserted heaven. They were surprised; you'd cancelled the room, they said. Even sadder, I went for supper. The woman was also surprised. I told her everything about your mother's illness and express the hope that nevertheless you'd soon arrive. Home by the back paths. I unpacked and now I'm writing to you. No letter from you was waiting for me; so I can expect nothing good from this. [...]'


Not long after that letter was written Janáček was in Hukvaldy, his country home, where Kamila and her children came to visit. Whilst playing in the woods nearby one of the boys got lost, and through searching for him Janáček caught a cold which developed into the pneumonia that eventually killed him.

For further information about Janáček's relationship with Kamila Stösslová you can read John Tyrrell's translation of their letters, Intimate Letters, which is published by Faber. Th hardback edition is now unavailable, though it has recently been published in paperback and can be ordered via the Bibliography page.

Janáček's wife's feelings about his relationship with Stösslová are made clear in her moving testimony My life with Janáček, which is also translated by John Tyrrell and published by Faber and Faber. At the time of writing it is still available and can be ordered via the link on the Bibliography page.