Welcome readers to todays offering from The Philatelist. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. We have an interesting story to tell of when the excitement of a new nation can inspire your music to a new level and success teamed with tragedy can make the eyes wander.
The stamp today is from the early days of communist Czechoslovakia. As such there is a great deal of emphasis on the culture of the Czech majority in the country. The effect is perhaps lost on the many ethnic minorities in the country. The effectiveness is also held back by the low quality of the printing. It really was several steps below what was being put out in Vienna, the former seat of the old empire.
The stamp is issue A243, a 1.60 Koruna stamp issued by Czechoslovakia on June 19th, 1953. The stamp features the music composer, teacher and historian Leos Janacek. The stamp was part of a two stamp issue issued to celebrate a music festival in Prague that year. According to the Scott catalog. the stamp is worth 25 cents in it’s cancelled state.
Leos Janacek was born to a schoolteacher and at an early age was recognized to have great musical talent. He was accepted into music school on scholarship and trained and made his home in Brno, in what was then still the Austria-Hungarian Empire. He stayed on as a teacher and married one of his students, Zdenka, who was also the daughter of the headmaster of the school. He split his time between composing and teaching and his early output was very heavily influenced by the German Wagner.
Over time his work gradually began to reflect the Czech nationalism that was growing up around him. Moravian folk music and Czech speaking styles became very evident in his operas, a first. In 1903, his family visited Saint Petersburg Russia to experience the music scene there and his daughter stayed to study Russian. She quickly got very sick and Janacek returned to bring her home to Brno where she died. The parents were naturally distraught and Zdenka attempted suicide. Leos threatened to divorce her, but they agreed to stay married and continue to live together but live separate lives.
Janacek’s eyes began to wonder and his operas took on a much more romantic feel. This helped get them beyond provincial Brno and productions were now able to be seen in Prague. After meeting a married woman named Kamila who was forty years his junior, he began a love sick correspondence. There are over 700 letters from him to her with her remaining aloof but in touch to his romantic writings. Her husband was in the army and often away. She became the inspiration for some of his most famous operas including “Jenufa”, and “The cunning little Vixen”. Kamila was with him and Zdenka at his bedside when he died in 1928 at age 74.
It is a little surprising that Janacek was honored with a stamp. The communist culture minister was not a fan regarding much of his work as unpolished. He had just carried out a purge that hit hard on former students of Janacek. It was though an international festival and Janacek’s work was known and performed abroad.
Well my drink is empty and so it is time to open up the conversation in the below comment section. A flirtatious couple today with 700 texts would probably not inspire operas. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.