Although Leoš Janáček’s fourth opera Osud remained unperformed for half a century it holds the key to understanding the background to the way in which Janáček worked. The opera demonstrates his need to break away from the gruelling work on Jenůfa and assimilate himself into the contemporary opera world (dominated by the likes of Puccini). Surprisingly for such a complex piece it was inspired by a chance meeting on holiday at a spa in Eastern Moravia in the summer of 1903.

Central Europe has always been renowned for its spas and everyone from royalty to writers and composers has taken the waters at Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary) or Marienbad (Mariánské Lázně). The spas at Karlovy Vary were discovered by King Charles IV whilst hunting, and have since become a grand and established holiday resort with a number of theatres and concert halls. Mariánské Lázně has been used as a spa since the 14th century and was a favourite of Chopin, who first visited the spa in July 1836. Janáček’s own favourite spa, Luhačovice, is situated in what is now the eastern most point of the Czech Republic, in Moravia, near the Slovakian border, though is perhaps less celebrated than others, having only been established at the beginning of the twentieth century. Architecturally speaking, Luhačovice is the most unique. Dušan Jurkovič, a Slovak architect and designer, was commissioned to produce a series of spa buildings from 1901 to 1903, which are an outstanding mélange of a vernacular style (taken from the timber houses of his native Slovakia) and the Arts and Crafts approach of M.H. Ballie Scott and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The water from the Vincentka spa in Luhačovice is equally famed and is bottled and exported. Cardiovascular, digestive, metabolic and respiratory diseases have all been treated with the waters, as well as a having a reputation for healing children.

Janáček’s first trip to the spa was taken at an immensely fashionable time, as the spa had only just been opened to visitors. There, away from his wife and Brno acquaintances, he sought relaxation, wandering through the forests and taking the water. Fedora Bartošova (the librettist of Osud) explained to a correspondent in 1933, Janáček ‘relived his musical inspirations [there], cured his physical ailments, and strengthened and stimulated his nerves, which were overwrought, as is often the case with a choleric person’. Although Leoš Janáček frequented the spa town of Luhačovice throughout his life, there were two trips, his first and in the summer of 1917 which were more significant than others, when the composer discovered new inspirations.

In 1903 Janáček, now approaching 50, was utterly dejected. He had completed composing his opera Její pastorkyňa (now widely known as Jenůfa) as Olga, his young daughter, lay dying. She just lived to hear her father play the completed vocal score. The opera, he said, was ‘tied with the black ribbon of the long illness, pains, and cries of my daughter’. Even though Janáček was completely shattered by Olga’s death, he summoned up the courage to send the score to the National Theatre in Prague. Composer Karel Kovařovic was the music director at the time and both he and the administrative director Gustav Schmoranz told Janáček that the work was unsuitable. There may have been a little spite in Kovařovic’s reasoning, as Janáček had previously written a scathing review of one of his own operas when it was performed in Brno. Whatever political wranglings provoked Kovařovic’s negative response, Jenůfa was without a Prague premiere (an obvious goal for any Czech composer working at the time) and the composer had to resolve himself to an opening in the small Czech theatre of his home of Brno. The theatre was a converted dance hall and was used provisionally until a permanent building could be founded. With Czechoslovakian independence in 1918 the Czech citizens inherited the previous German Staatstheater which formed their own National Theatre, so no second theatre was built. Relations between Janáček and his wife Zdenka had always been strained, but since Olga’s death and the previous passing of their son Vladimír in 1890 their marriage had completed deteriorated. Whilst on his first holiday in Luhačovice in June 1903 escaping from life in Brno, Janáček received three red roses at his dinner table, as remembered (though obviously second hand) by the Janáčeks’ maid of the time, Marie Stejskalová.

After Olga’s death and the Prague refusal of Jenůfa [Janáček] went for a cure to Luhačovice. He was sitting there at a table alone, sad and ailing, when suddenly an unknown beautiful woman sent him a bouquet of crimson roses. He went to thank here, and so they got acquainted. This was Mrs Kamila Urválková, whose husband was a forestry official in Zahájí u Dolních Kralovic in Bohemia. She was in Luhačovice for a heart treatment. Mrs Urválková had a strange penchant: she always carried three roses in her hand. She told the master about her life, and that she wanted to become an actress, and about her unhappy love for the conductor Čelanský. The master decided that he would write an opera about it.

Not only had the 28 year old Kamila Urválková had an ‘unhappy love’ for Ludvík Vítězslav Čelanský (known today principally as the founder of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra), but had found herself the subject of his 1897 opera Kamila. The opera had not portrayed Urválková in a favourable light. She was depicted as beautiful, but shallow and callous towards her poet lover (doubtless a portrait of Čelanský himself, whom she jilted). Janáček himself later had dealings with Čelanský when trying to get Osud performed in Prague. He was the Music Director of the new Vinhoradý Theatre there, and was on the selection board for new work. Unlike Čelanský however, Janáček was clearly smitten with Kamila, who he called ‘one of the most beautiful of women’ and whose stories of her life captivated him. After some persuasion from Urválková, Janáček agreed to write a new opera (provisionally called The Star of Luhačovice) to ‘clear her name’ of Čelanský’s operatic slur. She and the vivacious life of the spa became obvious, if slightly dangerous diversions from Janáček’s turbulent marriage and the heartache of earlier in the year.

Originally, Janáček’s scenario for the Kamila/Luhačovice opera was sketchy and rather ominous, to say the least. The first act was designed to be a realistic depiction of life at the spa. Although Luhačovice is never named, many of the local features which are named clearly define it as Janáček’s holiday town. The second act was even vaguer. Janáček wrote to Kamila Urválková that it ‘ought to reveal the extravagant interior of ladies’ boudoirs, the scenery of southern landscapes’. Act three he said ‘will be strange’. Though he did go on to explain that the basis for the opera was to include her (presumably as the ‘Star of Luhačovice’ of his provisional title) and a troubled composer figure, the opera he first proposed was very different from the Osud we know today.

Janáček continued to correspond with Urválková about the process of composing his opera after they returned home that summer. He enlivened the scenario and worked with Fedora Bartošová, a friend of his late daughter Olga, on the dramatisation of the story. Bartošová provided the verse. Although the opera evolved, the centre of attention remained with Urválková and Janáček sought to create a musical code for his new romantic interest. Reminiscing in his 1924 autobiography he wrote that ‘she was the most beautiful of women. Her voice was like violas d’amour’. The viola d’amour, a rather obsolete string instrument, had a special place in Janáček’s heart throughout his career, though as far as we know this was his first recourse to it. Two of the most influential operas on Janáček’s career, Gustave Charpentier’s 1900 Louise and Giacomo Puccini’s 1904 Madama Butterfly both use the instrument, though whether Janáček heard the instrument in performance in either Prague or Brno is unknown. The Paris of Louise was a great stimulus for the life of the spa in Osud, and like Charpentier’s heroine, Janáček needed a vocabulary for his own ‘Star of Luhačovice’. Although the final authorized score contains no music for the viola d’amour we discover from looking at the copyist’s manuscript that indeed many passages for two viola d’amour were changed (perhaps for reasons of practicality) to normal violas. But the significance of the instrument highlights the significance of his relationship with Urvalková.

Janáček returned year after year to Luhačovice, and when he came to stay in 1917, under much happier circumstances than before, he met Kamila Stösslová. More profoundly than with Urvalková, Stösslová became the composer’s muse. She sparked in Janáček great warmth, which gave him a new lease of life with his composition. Earlier in 1917 year Jenůfa was successfully received in Prague and would be again the following year in Vienna. Janáček was on his way to becoming a celebrated composer (albeit now in his 60s). Resembling Urvalková before her, Stösslová and Janáček wrote to each other prolifically, but unlike previously (Urvalková’s husband prevented her from writing to Janáček), Stösslová and Janáček’s correspondence continued for the rest of their lives. Their letters were published in Czech in 1990 (as Hádanka života, edited by Svatava Přibáňová) and in English in 1993 (as Intimate Letters, edited by John Tyrrell). There was, however, a huge sense of history repeating itself, which went beyond the fact they both had the same name. The operas Stösslová influenced, Káťá Kabanová (Janáček himself admitted his own debt to Puccini’s Cio-Cio-San when writing his opera) and The Makropulos Case both use the viola d’amour. The significance then of this instrument, the spa town and the name Kamila echoes through Janáček’s life. Perhaps like Živný, the composer in Osud, Janáček was just as open to fateful recurrence. To audiences and scholars today it shows that this Czech composer’s work is open to comparisons with his own life. Jenůfa was composed at a time when Janáček was contemplating his own fate as a parent (as with the Kostelnička), The Diary of One Who Disappeared and Káťa Kabanová were composed when Janáček was not entirely faithful to his wife Zdenka (though whether Stösslová and Janáček’s relationship was ever consummated we are unsure), The Makropulos Case with the ‘icy’ Emilia Marty, when the composer wanted to demonstrate Stösslová’s more unfeeling side, or indeed From the House of the Dead when the composer himself was perhaps aware that he himself was growing old. The biographical links with Osud are the most patent of all.

The opera was influenced by Janáček’s own experiences from the outset. Kamila Urválková’s name was adapted; so that Kamila Urválková became Mila Válková. Like her real-life counterpart, Mila had a husband in the first drafts of the opera. The composer Živný has (like Janáček) come to the spa to recover from the death of a daughter, which had eclipsed the composition of his previous work; his operas as equally misunderstood. Nevertheless the form of Osud didn’t remained entirely hinged on details of Janáček’s original scenario and sketches. Although many of the original features remained recognisably the same, other details were more open to change, particularly when it came to the relationship between the composer and his long lost love (who has an illegitimate child). Originally Mila’s husband was in tow (as in real life) but there was no sign of her mother, who was introduced later (and who is surely an older exaggerated manifestation of the Kostelnička). As time went on, Janáček’s vision for Osud evolved from being a slavish manifestation of his memories of his time in Luhačovice, becoming a reflection on his own fate as an artist. As well as the echoes with Janáček’s own fate, there are perhaps resonances with Thomas Mann’s ‘master writer’ Gustav von Aschenbach in Death in Venice (written nine years later), who escapes his life in Munich, where his writing has become lifeless to discover inspiration (albeit of a homoerotic kind) by the Lido (another aquatic holiday) in Venice. Benjamin Britten’s 1973 opera of Mann’s novella becomes less concerned with the atmosphere of Venice (though captured beautifully nevertheless) and focuses on the plight of an artist without inspiration, as with Janáček’s Osud. In Venice or Luhačovice that stimulation is discovered when least looking for it. It is therefore fitting that the motivation for Janáček’s opera (and indeed Živný’s) comes from a place so full of renewal and curative qualities, and indeed many metaphors exist where water is compared to creative renewal (wells, springs and flowing, for example).

Janáček’s changes to Osud may also have been through the need to distance himself from his initial encouragement, Kamila Urvalková. His correspondence with her was stopped by her husband, consequently Mila’s own appearances in the opera became shortened and the emphasis of the piece shifted to the composer. Janáček, like Živný, is at a loss to explain his music to the world. The perplexed conservatoire students gazing at Živný’s score could indeed have been Karel Kovařovic and his minions, who remained so confused by Janáček’s idiosyncratic style displayed in Jenůfa, which they had so brutally rejected. In real life Janáček, however, did not remedy any misunderstandings with a more traditional approach, which would have been the easy option, but resorted to the abstraction and avant-gardism of Osud and the parody of The Excursions of Mr Brouček, which was his next opera. Where Jenůfa had qualities of rigour (albeit through a pre-existing play structure), Osud was a breakaway from that. It is telling that Osud was never explicitly called an opera (‘three scenes from a novel’ in the authorised score, a ‘novella’ in his first copy of the libretto, or most poetically ‘novelistic fragments from life’), but perhaps like Tchaikovsky’s lyric-scenes for Eugene Onegin (Janáček himself made the comparison between Pushkin’s and his own librettists verse) we are not allowed to view the entire history of their characters, rather glimpses into their rather unfortunate lives. More personally and perhaps more revealingly, the opera was a escape from the horrors of the time he spent composing Jenůfa during both Olga’s death and the rejection of his opera from Prague. The correspondence between Janáček and Kamila Urvalková reveals his need to separate himself from that previous work.

Osud lingered unperformed in Janáček’s lifetime (its first staging was in Brno in October 1958), but remains a fitting reminder of how even the most celebrated composers and authors find themselves seeking inspiration. When Janáček travelled to Luhačovice to flee his life in Brno, he not only found the curative powers of the spa but a place which furnished him with the creative spring for the rest of his career, in the figures of two women called Kamila.

Originally published by the Teatro Real Madrid for their November 2003 production of Osud. [Sources quoted from John Tyrrell, Janaček’s Operas: A Documentary Account (London: Faber and Faber, 1992).]