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Only in art does it still happen that a man who is consumed by desires performs something resembling the accomplishment of those desires and that what he does in play produces emotional effects—thanks to artistic illusion—just as though it were something real.
So read how we have simply dreamt up our life.
On June 27, 1928, in one of the last of the many “intimate letters” he exchanged with the love of his life, Kamila Stösslová, Leoš Janáček reported that the Moravian Quartet had that day come to his home in Brno to play for the first time his last major work, the String Quartet No. 2, “Intimate Letters.”
I listen. Did I write that? Those cries of joy, but what a strange thing, also cries of terror after a lullaby. Exaltation, a warm declaration of love, imploring; untamed longing. Resolution, relentlessly to fight with the world over you. Moaning, confiding, fearing. Crushing everything beneath me if it resisted. Standing in wonder before you at our first meeting. Amazement at your appearance as if it had fallen to the bottom of a well and from that very moment I drank the water of that well. Confusion and high-pitched song of victory: “You've found a woman who was destined for you.” Just my speech and just your amazed silence. Oh, it's a work as if carved out of living
Page 407flesh. I think that I won't write a more profound and a truer one. So I end. (Janáček, 1994, p. 317)*
Having “carved” a work “out of living flesh,” thus did he “end”: less than two months later, Janáček was dead.3
When in 1917 Janáček first met Kamila Stösslová, he was sixty-two years of age to her twenty-five; they were both married, and she had two small children (Fig. 1). His ensuing voluminous correspondence tells more than the story of an unlikely (and likely unconsummated) romance: it tells of the astonishing outpouring of creativity during the last decade of Janáček's life, during which he composed four major operas and both of the two string quartets. Long r