Text As Muse, Muse As Text: Janáček, Kamila, and the Role of Fantasy in Musical Creativity

The essay provides a detailed reading and analysis of Leoš Janáček’s letters to his late-life muse, Kamila Stösslová. By placing the letters alongside the literary texts on which Janáček based his important late works, it provides insight into the tangle of emotions and conflicts that he organized within the rubric of fantasy. Janáček’s muse was also “composed”: the contours of the person he loved and his relationship to her were not only rooted in fantasy but also mapped onto the characterizations and narratives specified in the works of literature he chose to set to music. The author proposes that cultural fantasy exists in continual dynamic interaction with individual unconscious fantasy, within which it is absorbed, incorporated, and re-expressed in new works of art.