The Cunning Little Vixen
By Leoš Janáček
Leoš Janácek composed a Czech “Midsummer Night’s Dream” by turning a serial comic strip from a local newspaper into one of his most touching and inventive operas. The ingenious story tells the adventures of Vixen Sharp-Ears set in a world populated by humans as well as forest and barnyard animals.
Janácek’s opera is a masterful amalgam of operatic dialogue, songs, chorus, wordless singing, ballet, mime, and orchestral interludes. He combines the mythic, the tragic and the comic, creating a philosophical reflection on the cycle of life and death. It is one of the 20th century’s most imaginative excursions into a fantasy.
Príhody Lišky Bystroušky - The Cunning Little Vixen
According to the Janáček's servant for fourty-four years, Marie Stejskalová, it was her laughing at the newspaper cartoons of the adventures of Vixen Sharp-Ears that drew her master to the subject of Příhody Lišky Bystroušky, a story that appeared in a local newspaper in 1920. The Brno popular newspaper Lidové noviny had commissioned Rudolf Tĕsnohlídek to write a novel to be serialised which was to be based around a series of drawings by Stanislav Lolek telling the tale of the adventures of Vixen Sharp-Ears.
Tĕsnohlídek’s novel became the basis for the libretto. Despite the fact that many have argued its experimental basis; use of children on stage, preponderance of ballet scenes, the very use of a cartoon as the inspiration for an opera. It is also greatly indebted to operatic heritage. It follows on from the post-Wagnerian Märchenoper (‘fary-tale-opera’) tradition as made paradigmatic in Humperdinck’s operas Hänsel und Gretel and Königskinder. Equally its use of a travesti role (the Fox) to suggest youthful or sexually virile personalities (after Mozart’s Cherubino, Verdi’s Oscar, Massenet’s Chérubin or his Prince in Cendrillon, Strauss’s Octavian, Humperdinck’s Hänsel) shows a debt to tradition, which is sometimes overlooked. In its quasi-anthropomorphic treatment of the animals (some of the roles are doubled with those of the humans too) Janáček looks back with Beatrix Potter’s and Kenneth Grahame’s cuddly creations to an Ovidian world. However Janáček moves away from pure traditionalism by pioneering a fantastic musical language for the forest, based on his ‘notebook’ of animal sounds and a bitter sweet lyricism for the Vixen and the Fox (at its most heady in the Act One dream interlude and their Carmina Burana-style nuptials in Act Two). These stylistic innovations are married with a moving pantheistic close where the Forester realises, in one of Janáček’s most tender passages that nature has a cyclical basis, which goes much beyond the traditional mirrors of the Märchenoper genre, such as found in Dvořák’s Rusalka. It has, unsurprisingly received a large number of performances across the world.
Synopsis
Act I
The Forest. How Bystrouška was caught. Summer
The badger dozes in the heat of the afternoon, pestered by flies. The Dragonfly dances. The Forester pauses for a nap on his way home. While he sleeps, the Cricket and the Caterpillar give a concert. A young Vixen is exploring the forest for the first time. The Forester wakes, and seizes the inexperienced cub.
The yard of the Forester's cottage. Bystrouška grows up in the Forester's home. Autumn
The Vixen endures the morose sexual advances of the Dog, and defends herself vigorously against the baiting of the Forester's children. She is tied up for her pains. The Vixens dreams of her sexual awakening and liberation. Outraged by the economic and sexual slavery of the Hens, she becomes a feminist. But the Hens' conservatism is too much for her, and she systematically kills them all. She confronts the Forester, and escapes.
Act II
The Forest. Bystrouška acquires a home
The refugee Vixen returns to the forest, and ruthlessly evicts the Badger. She settles gratefully into his comfortable home.
The Inn. Winter
The Forester, full of drink, baits the Schoolmaster about his hopeless passion for Terynka, a gypsy girl. The Parson is pursued by his own sexual guilt and remorse. But the Forester too is susceptible when he is taunted about the Vixen that he lost, and finally rushes out in pursuit of her.
The Forest. Winter
The Vixen haunts the Schoolmaster and the Parson as they stumble home from the inn. The Schoolmaster mistakes her for Terynka, and is inspired to the single passionate outburst of his life. The Parson recalls his fatal encounter with a seductive young girl in his student days. The Forester wildly hunts the Vixen through the forest.
The Forest. Spring
The Vixen finds a mate, and is soon obliged to marry.
Act III
The Forest. Bystrouška is killed. Autumn
The poacher Harašta is going to visit Terynka, whom he is to marry. He finds a dead hare - one of the Vixen's victims. The Forester warns him to stay off poaching, and sets a trap for the Vixen. The Vixen and her mate play with their cubs. They find the trap, and ridicule the Forester's incompetence. Harašta returns to pocket the Hare. The Vixen at first outwits him, but becomes carried away by her exalted defiance of man, and is shot.
The Inn
The Schoolmaster bitterly regrets his lost opportunity - Terynka is to marry today. The Forester however accepts his growing age, and gladly sets out for a quiet nap in the forest.
The Forest. Summer
Inspired by the beauty of nature, the Forester's imagination is awakened for a moment of radiant spiritual perception. He sleeps and dreams of the Vixen. A Frog reminds him of the inevitable cycle of nature.
The Returning Little Vixen
When writing Příhody lišky bystroušky (or ‘The Cunning Little Vixen’, as it has come to be called), Leoš Janáček was not entirely sure what to call his new work, an ‘opera’, a ‘fable’ or perhaps, most aptly, an ‘opera idyll’. And logically, for such a wide-ranging work, The Vixen holds great appeal for singers, directors and designers alike, whose approaches extend from Gypsy folklore (Brussels, 1986) to Fiat 500s on stage (Spoleto, 1998) and back into animated form (BBC, 2002). There is a balance in the piece between realism (the various animals on stage and the stories of how Janáček notated their real-life counterparts’ noises and calls) and symbolism (the dual casting of animals and humans, the Forester’s final numinous epiphany). Of all Janáček’s operas, this one - his seventh - is perhaps most open to visual interpretation, but the composer himself was undecided of how his seventh opera should be staged. It is through the design that the audience is made aware that the opera is not just a simple tale about forest animals, but about the wider cycle of nature. A realistic mise en scène shows the gap between the animals and humans, where a less literal interpretation joins the two. It is not entirely clear whether Janáček wanted the two worlds linked. He encouraged the doubling of various parts, but this may have been partly a cost-effective decision for small or provincial theatres, such as in Janáček’s home-town of Brno. Janáček actively endorsed the doubling of parts and linking the many settings of his other comic opera, The Excursions of Mr Brouček, yet he wrote after the first performance of The Vixen in Mainz that ‘only a hint should surface of the sameness of our cycle and that of animal life. That is enough – it is true that for most this symbolism is too little’. Whatever the associations, two styles of production are associated with The Vixen, one realistic and one more symbolic. Composed in Brno and at Janáček’s retreat in Hukvaldy without hitch or revision, the opera was premiered in Brno on 6 November 1924, as recollected by his maid.
The master took great pleasure from the Brno première of The Vixen. He would come back from rehearsals laughing at how the singers were learning to crawl on all fours. The opera chief Neumann, the producer Zítek, and the painter Milén, who designed the sets, made such beautiful work out of The Vixen, that it surprised even the master.
(Janáček’s housekeeper)
Indeed ‘the master’ had very few reservations about the production, only that some of the roles were cast as adults, where children would have been more fitting. Milén’s designs for the Brno premiere tended towards a more ‘arty’ style, with most famously a cubist dachshund. Vixen Sharp-Ears was a foxified human, wearing a feather boa and a hat with subtle little ears, as depicted in Milén’s illustration on the front page of the original piano score. Janáček was so impressed by Zítek’s and Milén’s ‘beautiful work’ that he urged Otakar Ostrčil, the Music Director of the Prague National Theatre, to take the Brno production. Ostrčil was adamant that Prague would wish ‘to solve The Vixen in [its] own way’. The Prague premiere (in a new production by Ferdinand Pujman and sets by Josef Čapek) was given on 18 May 1925 as part of that year’s International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) festival, leading to the first broadcast of one of Janáček’s operas. Not all aspects of the production pleased the composer. The Forester’s Act III aria when his ‘gun simply slips from his hand’ was changed to him convulsing in death throes. Janáček and his German translator Max Brod despised the idea. When Brod made his own translation of the opera for the first foreign premiere in Mainz in 1927, he also placed his own stamp on the opera, ‘to make things clearer and more concentrated’. His German version of the text was more of a free adaptation of Janáček’s original rather than a faithful translation. It created links between Harašta’s invisible lover Terynka and the title-role, but on the contrary he abolished many of the doubled parts, breaking down the connections between the animals and humans. Janáček never interpolated Brod’s changes into his original, preferring his own intentions. The opera continued to remain dear to the composer throughout his life and the final scene was played at his funeral in 1928, as later recalled by his wife.
At ten there was the funeral at the theatre. The opera director František Neumann began to play the final scene from The Cunning Little Vixen where the Forester – sung by Arnold Flögl – reminisces. As soon as I heard the first few bars it was if a strong stream of light shone through that eerie indistinctness which had enveloped me […]. Music was necessary for me to grasp fully what had happened, so that I could feel in its full intensity that Leoš, who had written this work so packed with life, was now lying dead.
(Janáček's wife)
After Janáček’s death, before World War II, further performances took place in Brno, in Prague (1937, in a new orchestration by František Škvor and Jaroslav Řídký) as well as in Liberec, Bratislava, Olomouc, Plzeň and Ostrava. For some time however the opera remained only popular in Czechoslovakia, despite notable premieres in Mainz and Zagreb (1939). After the war Walter Felsenstein’s staged the opera at the Komische Oper, Berlin. Conducted by Václav Neumann, the production was seen in Paris in 1957 and Prague in 1962. This more realistic production helped to popularise the little-known piece, bringing it to non-Czech audiences. Contrary to prevailing opinion, however, Felsenstein's production did not establish The Vixen outside Central Europe. The opera’s first UK performance was at the Sadler’s Wells Opera in 1961, conducted by Colin Davis, in a production by Colin Graham with designs by Barry Kay. Still, The Cunning Little Vixen did not appear with regularity outside Germany and Czechoslovakia until the 1970s. It was performed at the Royal Academy of Music in 1973 and in 1975 Jonathan Miller staged a production at Glyndebourne, which then toured and conducted by a young Simon Rattle. The opera was also staged during the 1970s in Santa Fe (1975), Melbourne (1976), San Francisco (1977), Osaka (1977), Gothenburg (1978) and Tokyo (1978), marking its final established entry into the world-wide repertory. Perhaps the most enduring interpretation of more recent times is Scottish Opera and WNO’s 1980 production first given as part of their Janáček ‘cycle’. Having performed Jenůfa (1975), The Makropulos Case (1978) and Kát’a Kabanová (1979), they turned to The Vixen (1980) and finally to From the House of the Dead (1982), all directed by David Pountney and designed by the late Maria Bjørnson. This cycle confirmed a permanent home for the Czech composer’s stage works in the national repertory. The opening performances of The Vixen were conducted by Richard Armstrong, with Helen Field in the title-role and Philip Joll as the Forester. The production created a compromise between the realistic and symbolic stances of previous productions. The sets of rolling fields, split to produce interiors, and to which were added huge white sheets for snow, bare, root-less branches for autumn and twirling flowers for the wedding were coupled with a sassy Charleston-tripping Vixen (as in Brno in 1924). The production achieved great popularity after its first performance at the Edinburgh Festival and to date it has been produced by WNO, Scottish Opera, Opera North and English National Opera, touring all over Britain. Recently it has also been seen in Milan and Venice. The opera was performed in 1981 at New York City Opera (in a new translation by Yveta Synek Graff and Robert T. Jones) in a production which featured designs by Maurice Sendak (whose most famous drawings for Where the Wild Things Are themselves became the subject of an opera by Oliver Knussen). Despite these increasing numbers of performances in the many City Opera/Volksoper equivalents of the world, some more established opera houses took longer to find a place for The Vixen. Performed by Sadler’s Wells (now ENO) since its first performance in 1961 Janáček’s opera was not performed at Covent Garden until 7 June 1990. The interpretation by its director, Bill Bryden, is less literal than some, and from the outset William Dudley’s designs reverberate the message of the Forester’s mystical monologue. The unbroken presence of a large wheel, clock mechanics and people who morph from animals to humans all accentuate the opera’s tragi-comic ‘merry-go-round of life’. Such ideas are hard to portray realistically, as many directors have found throughout the opera’s performance history, and perhaps this and the Pountney production have, like the Brno original, been the closest to Janáček’s own mixed messages about how the piece should be staged. William Dudley's design for the Vixencub Despite problems with staging, this ebullient opera really had popularity written all over it from the outset. Far removed from the desperate histrionics of Jenůfa or Kát’a Kabanová, it eventually found a niche in the international repertory. Although the composer’s sunniest and most accessible opera, the magnetism of The Cunning Little Vixen is that this ‘merry thing with a sad end’ is visually and philosophically his most complex work. As the repertory’s own cycle continues to revolve and Janáček’s works maintain to be discovered and grow in popularity, this glowing opera allows a vital root into the Moravian composer’s idiosyncratic world for both performers and audiences alike. (Gavin Plumley)
Leoš Janáček
Leoš Janáček (July 3, 1854 – August 12, 1928) was a Czech composer. He was inspired by Czech, Moravian and all Slavic folk music and on these roots created his original style. His most celebrated compositions, besides his operas, include the symphonic poem Sinfonietta, the oratorial Glagolitic Mass, the rhapsody Taras Bulba, the instrumental cycle Lachian Dances, and his string quartets.
Life And Work
Janáček was born in Hukvaldy, Moravia, (then part of the Austrian Empire), the son of a schoolmaster. In 1865 he enrolled as a ward of the foundation of the Abbey of St. Thomas in Brno, where he took part in choral singing and occasionally played the organ. In 1874 went to Prague to study music at Prague organ school and made a living as a music teacher. He also conducted various amateur choirs. From October 1879 to February 1880 he studied piano, organ, and composition at the Leipzig Conservatory; among his teachers there were Oskar Paul and Leo Grill. From April to June 1880 he studied composition at the Vienna Conservatory with Franz Krenn. In Leipzig Janáček composed Thema con variazioni for piano in B flat subtitled Zdenka’s Variations. In 1881 he returned to Brno, where he married Zdenka Schulzová. He was appointed director of the organ school, a post he held until 1919, when the organ school became the Brno Conservatory. In 1888 he attended the performance in Prague of Tchaikovsky’s music, and he met the older composer personally. At that time he also started a systematic study and collection of folk songs, dances and music. In 1903 his daughter Olga died. In 1905 Janáček attended a demonstration in support of a Czech university in Brno, which inspired his composition of the 1. X. 1905 piano sonata. In 1916 he started a long professional and personal relationship with theatre critic, dramatist and translator Max Brod. When Jenůfa was performed in Prague in 1916 it was a great success, and brought Janáček his first acclaim; he was 62. A year later he met Kamila Stösslová, a young married woman who was an inspiration to him for the remaining years of his life, and with whom he conducted an obsessive correspondence – passionate on his side at least. In 1924, the year of his 70th birthday, the first biography of Janáček was published by Max Brod. In 1925 he retired. In 1926 Janáček travelled to England, The Netherlands and Germany. In August 1928, along with Kamila Stösslová and her son Otta, he made an excursion to Štramberk. Soon after this Janáček became ill, and died in the sanatorium of Dr. L. Klein in Ostrava. He is buried at the Central Cemetery in Brno.
Style
In 1874 Janáček became friends with Antonín Dvořák, and began composing in a relatively traditional romantic style, but after his opera Šárka (1881), his style began to change. He made a study of Moravian and Slovak folk music and used elements of it in his own music. He especially focused on studying and reproducing the rhythm and the pitch contour and inflections of normal Czech speech, which helped in creating the very distinctive vocal melodies in his opera Jenůfa (1904). Going much farther than Modest Mussorgsky and anticipating the later work of Béla Bartók in such styles, Janáček made this a distinguishing feature of his vocal writing (Samson 1977). He is best known for the music he wrote from this point to the end of his life. Although many consider his output from this period to mark his mature style, he had been writing in this fashion for quite a number of years but had simply not received wide public acclaim earlier. Much of Janáček's work displays great originality and individuality. His work is tonal, although it employs a vastly expanded view of tonality. He also uses unorthodox chord spacings and structures, often making use of modality: "there is no music without key. Atonality abolishes definite key, and thus tonal modulation....Folksong knows of no atonality." (Hollander 1963) He features accompaniment figures and patterns, with according to Jim Samson, "the on-going movement of his music...similarly achieved by unorthodox means—often a discourse of short, 'unfinished' phrases comprising constant repetitions of short motives which gather momentum in a cumulative manner." (Samson 1977)
Legacy
Janáček belongs to a wave of 20th century composers who were seeking greater realism and greater connection with everyday life, combined with a more all-encompassing use of musical resources. His operas in particular demonstrate the use of "speech"-derived melodic lines, folk and traditional material, and complex modal musical argument. Janáček's works are still regularly performed around the world, and are generally considered popular with audiences. He would also inspire later composers in his homeland, as well as music theorists, among them Jaroslav Volek, to place modal development alongside of harmony in importance in music. Many see the operas Káťa Kabanová (1921), The Cunning Little Vixen (1924), The Makropulos Affair (1926) and From the House of the Dead (after a novel by Dostoevsky, premiered in 1930, after his death) as his finest works. The conductor Sir Charles Mackerras has become particularly closely associated with them. His chamber music, while not especially voluminous, includes works which are generally considered to be "in the standard repertory" as 20th century classics, particularly his two string quartets: Quartet No. 1, "The Kreutzer Sonata" inspired by the Tolstoy novel, and the Quartet No. 2, "Intimate Letters". At Frankfurt am Main modern music festival in 1926 Ilona Štěpánová-Kurzová performed the world premiere of Janáček's Concertino; the Czech premiere took place on February 16 1926 in Brno. Other well known pieces by Janáček include the Sinfonietta, the Glagolitic Mass (the text written in Old Church Slavonic), Lachian Dances, and the rhapsody Taras Bulba. These pieces and the above mentioned four late operas were all written in the last decade of Janáček's life.
Operas
- 1887 - Šárka
- 1894 - Počátek Románu, "The Beginning of a Romance"
- 1904 - Její pastorkyňa, "Her Stepdaughter", known in English as Jenůfa
- 1904 - Osud, "Fate"
- 1920 - Výlety pana Broučka, "The Excursions of Mr. Broucek"
- 1921 - Káťa Kabanová
- 1924 - Příhody lišky Bystroušky, "The Cunning Little Vixen"
- 1926 - Věc Makropulos, "The Makropoulos Affair"
- 1930 - Z mrtvého domu, "From the House of the Dead"
Kamila Stösslová - the composer's muse
Every year it was customary for Janáček to spend a few weeks in the Moravian spa town of Luhačovice. There he took the waters and strolled through the countryside. His opera Osud is set there, and it recalls much of the cosmopolitan holiday atmosphere of the place in the opening of the first act. In the summer of 1917 Janáček was enjoying great popularity, as Jenůfa had finally been heard in Prague. Something more important happened at the spa town however, as it was there that he met Kamila Stösslová, the young wife of an antique dealer from Písek, who greatly influenced the composer’s last period of productivity. Janáček was twice her age yet became utterly infatuated with her. Their relationship is detailed extensively in their correspondence of more than seven hundred letters. Many of Stösslová’s letters were burnt by Janáček, but the large majority of his to her survived.
Throughout their communications Janáček mentioned his work and often told Stösslová that she was the influence for the work at hand. Very shortly after the composer’s visit to Luhačovice in July 1917 he started composing the setting of the poem’s ‘from the pen of a self-taught man’ printed in the local paper, which told the story of a farm boy’s sexual infatuation with a gypsy girl. These poems became the song cycle Zápisník zmizelého [A Diary of One who disappeared]. Janáček wrote to Kamila saying that, ‘regularly in the afternoon a few motifs occur to me for those beautiful little poems about that Gypsy love. Perhaps a nice little musical romance will come out of it – and a tiny bit of the Luhačovice mood would be in it.’
ndeed he went on to write further that ‘the black Gypsy girl in my Diary – that was especially you’. As soon as the final revision of the work was completed Janáček started work on the next ‘Kamila’ work, his opera Kát'a Kabanová. Again the influence of his love for Stösslová was clearly stated in his series of letters to her on the subject. He wrote that he ‘always placed [her] image on Kát'a Kabanová when [he] was writing the opera’, and when it was finished he told her that ‘you know it’s your work’. In fact throughout their correspondence, and as Janáček finished Kát’a and moved onto the Vixen, and Emilia in Vĕc Makropulos he drew parallels with their characters and that of Kamila. But as John Tyrrell writes in his introduction to the English edition of the letters that although they are ‘the most important source for the understanding of Janáček’s emotional and creative life in the last twelve years’, apart from their musicological significance ‘they contain a great love story’.
Their story was not always happy. As with Janáček’s obsession with Kamila Urválková and his affair with Gabriela Horvátová (the Kostelnička for the Prague premiere of Jenůfa) there were recriminations at home, and his dealings with his wife became increasingly strained. The relationship with Stösslová was never consummated however, and sometimes her lack of ability in replying to the composer’s letters caused him great upset. That apart, she was the woman who influenced the composer more than anyone or anything else. More often than not the warmth that he felt towards her found its way into the amazingly humanitarian works of his last period of composition.
Throughout his life of domestic fireworks we see there are two things which influenced him profoundly, over and over again: a sense of place, and a sense of those whom he loved and who loved him. The impact of Kamila Stösslová cannot be emphasised enough when considering the great operas of his maturity. For a man whose first main opera was heard in his 50th year, the achievement of Leoš Janáček is immense and emotionally startling.
