Janáček’s Eternal Love

Chapter Three

Janáček’s Brno

Introduction. Moravia (Mähren in German, Morava in Czech) is the second of the Czech lands, with Bohemia (Böhmen, Čechy) and Silesia (Schlesien, Slezsko) forming today’s Czech Republic, and together with the cigar-shaped, picturesque mountain land to the east, Slovakia, making up the Czechoslovakia fashioned out of Central Europe after the Great War by the philosopher-president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. Until 1918 Moravia was under Habsburg dominion, German the administrative language and Czech the vernacular. For a time in the ninth century the Great Moravian Empire was the cradle of the burgeoning Slavic nations. Janáček was a Moravian, a Czechoslovak citizen and a Czech musician, more narrowly, a Moravian musician.

Moravia is a beautiful land of uplands, hills, mountain chains and lowlands, divided from Bohemia to the east by the NE - SW Vysočina uplands and from Moravian Silesia by parts of the Jeseníky hills to the north. The Eastern Moravian Beskydy mountains extend to the spur of the White Carpathians that divides Poland from Moravia and Slovakia. This is a stubbornly independent land with its own styles of speech and distinctive folk dress. The Moravians and their neighbors, the wealthier Czechs with their caput regni, Prague, understand and speak the same language, but differently, and out of differences come mutual misunderstandings and hatreds that extraordinary personalities, like Masaryk, a Moravian who loved all Slavic nations and who fashioned Czechoslovakia in 1918, are able to overcome.

Queen Eliška Rejčka. As I write this, eighty-five years of violent and hectic central European history have blown away like a leaf in the wind since Janáček rushed off to the station to meet Kamila, with an uncanny prescience in his chest that he would never return. The city, his city, has today sprawled out to all directions of the compass, now with thirty separate named quarters within the catastral limits of the dark old Moravian metropolis, and a population of four hundred thousand, several times over what it was in 1928. 

Once upon a time, when Brno was young and only recently bearing the bureaucratic title of město, city, the Castle of Špilberk was young and bright, or perhaps was an earlier Romanesque version of its present self. The grass was green and the air was pure and the blood of kings and nobles fertilized the lands. The princedoms ruling the feudal dominions of their estates struck coins of the realm and the city of Brno became important as a fortified trading center halfway between Prague and Vienna. The oldest Czech historical chronicle, the Latin Kronika Kosmova, mentions Brno in the eleventh century, Brno called Bruna, adjective brunensis. 

This is a story of one of the most famous of Brno’s medieval citizens, whose name is the first to be encountered in any brief history of the town. She was very intelligent and very beautiful, and became the wealthiest person, or the second wealthiest, in all the land. Her partner was the wealthiest, and they lived together in blissful happiness, respected by the citizenry though they never married — perhaps out of superstition, as in those days so many noble marriages seemed to end in violent death. She lived to be forty-seven, died a natural death, and did many good things.

This was Eliška Rejčka,born Richenza or Riksa, twice Czech queen and twice widowed, a woman with royal blood from Poland and Sweden in her veins, daughter of the Polish king Přemysl II,called Piastovec,and the Swedish princess Richenza, born September 1, 1288, in the merry thirteenth century. Her mother was murdered, and her father sought the throne of Krakow, which he attained when she was seven. He, too, was murdered, reputedly by Brandenberg margraves. In 1297 the wife of the Czech king Václav II died, leaving him a widower, Václav, the son of the famous Czech King of Iron and of Gold, Otakar II. Václav saw the advantages in marriage over those of the sword, and with the help of Czech silver from the mines at Kutná Hora and the support of a Habsburg prince, he soon received the twelve-year old Richenza in marriage. She had been betrothed to the fierce Ota the Long, who plundered Bohemia after Otakar’s death. Václav,known for his attraction to young women, gave her, fortunately for her, to an aunt to bring up. It was not lost on the girl that she now was close to the thrones of three nations. Václav, meantime, attacked Poland, and, they say, stuffed the church with armed knights for protection for his coronation. He survived.

In time he had Richenza crowned Czech and Polish Queen, in Prague, before the altar of St. Vitus. The responsibility of wars and fiefdoms occupied the king. While in Hungary rescuing his son Václav III he was obliged to return home to save his country from a Hungarian attack in Kutná Hora, where Albrecht of Habsburg was in pursuit of the silver mines. Legend has it the miners were able to poison the attackers with dross from the silver mines — cyanide poisoning. he chronicler writes: “They thirsted for silver and they drank slag.” In 1305 Václav succumbed to tuberculosis, dying in Prague in the house U Kamenného zvonu ‘At the Stone Bell’ on Old Town Square.

Eliška, now a young widow with a baby daughter, Anežka, was expected to enter a convent and spend her days in mournful prayer, but Albrecht married her off to his son Rudolf Habsburg, who became Czech king, known mockingly as Král Kaše ‘King Porridge’. In 1306 Kaše died under suspicious circumstances, supposedly of dysentery. Young Richenza was now eighteen and already twice a widow.She had a double inheritance of forty hřivny, or half-weights of gold. She was immeasurably rich. She was given the East Bohemian town of Hradec, known henceforth as Hradec Králové, Queen’s Redoubt, just NE of Kutná Hora. Czechified, her name became Rejčka. She soon founded the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit and became the town’s leading citizen. 

And then, at last, she fell in love.After all, she was eighteen. He was an amazing man, no longer young. In 1303 he accidentally killed the Brandenberg noble Herman of Barba and had to leave the court for a time, but redeemed himself by his cunning and prowess in the military service of the king. His name was Jindřich of Lípa (Lípa is a middle-sized north Bohemian town). Jindřich had supported King Porridge after the poisoning, or death from dysentery, of Václav.He was handsome, sensitive, and intelligent. This man Jindřich Rejčka loved. He was the love of her life, love at first sight and forever sight.

Now, the present king was Jan Lucemburský, who discovered an apparent plot with a nobleman named Vilém Zajíc of Valdek to dethrone him. Eliška was implicated. For a time the king was planning to kill Jindřich, but he once again proved himself valiant and indispensable to the throne. Eliška was exiled.She went to Brno, of all places, joined at last by her lover Jindřich. She set herself up in a house on Rybí trh ‘Fish Market’, now Dominican Square right in the heart of Old Brno, a house, by the way, given her by the king, who had a forgiving nature and was clearly taken in by her dazzle.