Intimate Letters

The last string quartet

(Leoš Janáček and Kamila Stösslová)

She reads romances, she spells poorly, she’s full-breasted,

broad in the beam, matron in a cloche hat,

bulky knee-length skirt, apron, thick calves, white stockings, Mary Janes.

Her heels go click click on the pavement.

She has those dark Gypsy eyes and the wide laugh.

He loves it when she tosses her head like that.

And here she is in long skirt and embroidered blouse, posing

by her dwarf ornamental orange tree on the balcony:

high pale forehead, stacked dark hair, heavy jaw, bust cleaving forward like a prow.

And here she is on holiday with her husband the businessman the perpetual traveller

with the commanding walk and striped tie and blunt mustache.

“Two decidedly Jewish types,” writes Zdenka Janáčková, J’s wife:

they send her, in the last year of the war,

bread, butter, eggs, semolina flour, geese

from the husband’s military contacts.

“My dear dark dove,” J calls Kamila, “My little one.”

He has taken dictation from every fountain in Hukvaldy,

where he was born to endless mumbled rosaries of water.

He notes the gush and prattle of the Fox’s Well

as the beech tree flashes its sleight of leaf, and fox kits hide in the rocks;

the public fountain, “a fine of ten crowns

on those who fail to replace the cover”:

and when the cover is replaced

the fountain closes her eyes;

the castle fountain, handsome, broad and brimming, but scuttled into pipes

for manor farm, brewery and slaughterhouse

where the stream blurts out in blood;

and the little well hidden through tall grass at Kazničov,

springing up through the roots of three lime trees, “Helisov’s Well,”

chants the little girl, and he notes that too, the quavering fall

of the name; and watches water bugs skitter

and green moss, darkling, at the bottom, and shards of sky.

Bread, butter, eggs, semolina flour, geese.

Kamila knows nothing of music, she worries about her dress

for the première of Jenůfa in Vienna.

She has two little boys, Rudi and Otto.

Otto the baby swims on her hand

and she leans over him, soft as night, one eyebrow tilted up

as at a dream of which she is hardly aware.

“She was of medium height, dark, curly-haired like a Gypsy woman,”

writes Zdenka, “with great, black bulging eyes.

The voice was unpleasant, shrill.”

—That once again he saw “her raven hair, all loose,”

and she was barefoot in the house

and she climbed a ladder to pick apricots from the tree

and she refused the gift of the knitted silver bag

“And your eye has a strange depth, it’s so deep it doesn’t shine.”

Night leans hugely.

He sleeps alone, in his study, upstairs at the Organ School.

Zdenka sleeps in their villa across the yard.

He who had scrawled

on his cuffs, on envelope scraps, on market paper, in his little pad,

robins’ trills, girls’ chatter at the railway station,

fox bark, thrush whistle, hen cackle,

kitten mew, bee hum, “the chord of stalagmites covered with hoarfrost,”

the airy, bell-like patter of fountain spray,

scored

in a notebook

years before Kamila

in a notebook

2 A.M. 24 February 1903

his daughter’s dying

words—

Olga—

dying, age 21—

in a notebook—

“Now I remember that I’m supposed to die”

(a little string of quarter notes, B and middle C)—

“What walks we took on the corso”—“We

should say so much—”

He tells her,

“You are the most beautiful among them,” and she smiles,

in his notebook she smiles.

And, down to a G,

“Something gets lost so well, no one can find it.”

In a notebook—

2:45 A.M. 25 February 1903, Olga,

her light hair spread across the pillow,

sighs

“A-y-a,” two drawn out B’s, scrupulously noted by her father,

and in the margin,

“God be with you, my soul.”

What can be assimilated into song?

The rivers of Lachia: the River Lubina

falls from a ridge of the Radhošť Mountain

into an abyss, to seethe of silver, crash of dark;

the Ondřejnice dabbles through the village of Mĕrkovice,

past mossy banks, shallow, beery-blonde, tepid, where goslings swim

dunking for weeds and bugs; and the River Ostravice

is the color of steel, and smites the wrist with cold:

and all the Lachian rivers run

through cello depths, horn hurtle, foam-spray of glockenspiel,

clash of cymbals at the smoky inn

where Sofie Harabisová flies from arm to arm

in the glare, smoke, sweat and stamp of feet:

“Where is the poet Šťastný or Professor Batĕk or Mrs. Marie Jungova now?

Gone, all gone, those who took part

that wild summer night, forty-five years ago!”

Kamila reads romances.

“There’s no love just innocent

friendship. My husband’s

away all the time he’s always

got things to do.”

“Your raven hair—

I write these lines so they’ll be read, and yet unread

because unanswered.

So it’s like a stone falling into water—”

“You’re the star I look for in evening—”

“I was your shadow—”

“Even thoughts become flesh—”

in the fountain bubbling up among the lime tree roots,

mumbling its prayers over and over, tonguing the stones.

Now after the war, no need

for bread, butter, eggs, semolina flour, geese delivered

by special connection

and Czechoslovakia is free in the Sinfonietta, in the razzle of brass:

“I’m really

an ordinary woman Your heart would stop

aching if you saw me more.”

There’s Rudi, there’s Otto,

and her husband always dealing in his antiques.

No we cannot attend the première in Prague no we cannot.

Now after the war.

For that cold: boil three onions with marjoram and lemon peel

and drink it like tea with sugar.

Your raven hair.

I was your shadow, when you reached for the apricots.

Gut scrapings: the bow scrapes sunlight from that summer day at the spa at Luhačovice

where she sat on the grass “like an exhausted little bird”:

“Dear Madam, Accept these few roses as a token”

where she sat on the grass, scrape sunlight

from the inner petals, scrape the dark from

her pupil, so deep it doesn’t shine.

Madam:

“Silence goes to sleep under every tree.”

Under the tilt of her shadowed brow.

His baby son died those years ago

and Olga’s hair

spreads wide across the pillow where she sighs.

He sleeps alone

it’s like a stone

falling.

Lullaby,

bee swarms,

gut scraping, fracture, a waltz

falters, the schmaltzy tune with raven hair

whispers, breaks off, and the hand she lets him

touch, for the first time, she does not draw away

the first time, “your little hand,”

in eleven years, under the linden boughs.

“That dark Jewess,” writes Zdenka, “I rather

liked her at first, but I held my position.

You know how artists are. They have to be

handled. I would not

let him go.”

“These letters were written in fire.”

Zdenka must

understand:

Kamila is

the Gypsy girl, Káťa Kabanová, the Vixen, Aljeja,

the little hidden well by the lime trees at Kazničov,

the military fanfare on the promenade,

trumpet, oboe, piccolo squeal

when the Austrians march out, the Empire crashes, and the country is,

like the high-wire flute notes, finally, free.

Zdenka must acknowledge this:

These letters

were written in fire.

By now Kamila’s boys have been stuffed into trousers, stiff collars, and neckties.

They’ve grown leggy, their faces are plump.

It’s a question of tempi slightly retarded, a vertigo

the viola suffers, following the violins.

Silence goes to sleep under every tree.

The cello drags

gusts of confetti, repetition, emotion is all

repetition

pulled by twisted horsehair

out of gut.

My dear dark dove, a form of mourning,

that too is a form

of repetition.

Why don’t you write.

So when, those last days, she has come

at last, with little Otto, respectably

to visit the upstairs room he has built and furnished for her

in his summer cottage in Hukvaldy,

furnished according to his dream—

“I want to have the painting of those two cherubs, a writing desk, a communal table,

a comfortable bed, perhaps of brass, a wardrobe with mirrored doors, a marble wash-stand,

and four chairs, each from a different part of the world—”

(the question is, what can be assimilated

into song)

she peels oranges, makes tea,

they shop in the market and play and walk

and August 8, on the walk up the Babí hůra Hill, Otto gets lost in the woods and ravines—

Something gets lost so well, no one can find it—

and Leoš seeks and seeks the child in drenching rain

as if searching for his own

son

in the woods and ravines

under the wing of her darkly tilting brow

and returns

fevered.

In a notebook no one writes, no one scores his cough.

10 August 1928 J consents to go

to the hospital in Ostrava

pneumonia—deterioration—sedative

What walks we took on the corso

Something gets lost so well

So it’s like a stone

Silence goes to sleep under every tree

I was your shadow

I burned your letters but I keep

the ash

No one scored the sleep rattle in Ostrava

12 August 10 A.M. Sunday Kamila at his side,

a heavy woman who spells poorly, broad in the beam,

with thick knees and white stockings,

who reads romances,

who will die of cancer

seven years later

at 43

and be buried in the Jewish cemetery in Písek.

“And I kissed you

And you are sitting beside me and I am happy and at peace

In such a way do the days pass for the angels.”

No one scored the sleep rattle Sunday 12 August.

Only then, by his order,

Zdenka

is told

and arrives by train.

These letters were written in fire.

Notes:

The title comes from one of Janáček’s last works, the String Quartet Number 2 (1928). The poem quotes extensively from, and rearranges, sentences in the correspondence of the composer Leoš Janáček and Kamila Stösslová, a young married woman whom he met at the Moravian spa town of Luhačovice in 1917. Janáček was sixty-three when they met, Kamila Stösslová twenty-five. She was a conventional young woman, poorly educated, and fully (and, it appears happily) occupied in her marriage to David Stössel, a dealer in antiques and paintings. The couple had two boys, Rudolf (born 1913) and Otto (born 1916). Janáček, who had been estranged from his wife, Zdenka Janáčková, for many years, though they still lived together in the city of Brno, became enamored of Kamila. For the last eleven years of his life, she was his muse and his passion, inspiring many of his late works. As the letters show, this love developed mainly through distance and separation, as Mrs. Stösslová stayed loyal to her husband and would permit no physical impropriety, though she and her husband did occasionally visit the Janáčeks, and though Janáček did visit them, off and on, in the town of Písek where they lived. In the last few days of the composer’s life, Kamila finally came to spend a few days with him in his summer cottage in his boyhood village, Hukvaldy, with her son Otto. It was there that Janáček caught the pneumonia that killed him.
The story is told through the selection of letters, Intimate Letters, beautifully edited and translated by John Tyrrell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). The lines I have quoted come from that book and also from Janáček: Leaves from His Life, edited and translated by Vilem and Margaret Tausky (New York: Taplinger, 1982), and from Leos Janáček by Ian Horsbrugh (New York: Scribners, 1981). Zdenka Janáčková, Janáček’s widow, gives her own version of the story in My Life with Janáček, edited and translated by John Tyrrell (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1998).
Janáček used to jot down words he heard in conversation, and set them to music. I have tried to arrange the words of Janáček and Mrs. Stösslová as a kind of poetic score, responsive to qualities I hear in the string quartet he wrote for her.
I have abbreviated book titles as follows: Intimate Letters as IL, Janáček: Leaves from His Life as Leaves; and Leoš Janáček as LJ.

“when she tosses her head like that ...” IL 134.
“Two decidedly Jewish types ...” IL 7.
“a fine of ten crowns ...” Leaves 66.
“She was of medium height ...” IL 7.
“her raven hair, all loose ...” IL 48
“And your eye has a strange depth ...” IL 48.
“the chord of stalagmites covered with hoarfrost ...” Leaves 70.
Olga’s dying words are transcribed from Janáček’s notebook page, reproduced in LJ 52.
“The rivers of Lachia ...” Leaves 30.
“Where is the poet � ťastný ...” Leaves 30.
“So it’s like a stone falling into water ...” IL 23.
“You’re the star I look for in the evening ...” IL 39.
“There’s no love just innocent friendship ...” IL 39.
“I was your shadow ...” IL 103.
“Even thoughts become flesh ...” IL 104.
“I’m really an ordinary woman ...” IL 50.
“For that cold ...” IL 164.
“like an exhausted little bird ...” IL 3.
“Dear Madam, Accept these few roses ...” IL 3.
“Silence goes to sleep under every tree ...” IL 22.
“your little hand ...” IL 127.
“... were written in fire ...” IL 282.
“Zdenka must understand ...” adapted from the letter of June 8, 1927, IL 121.
“I want to have the painting ...” IL 225.
“And I kissed you ...” Janáček’s last entry in the album he shared with Kamila, a day or so before his death. IL 344.

Copyright Credit: Rosanna Warren, "Intimate Letters" from Departure. Copyright © 2003 by Rosanna Warren. Used by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. This selection may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Source: Departure (W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2003)