Leoš Janáček : The Cunning Little Vixen, Garsington Opera

"Janáček started The Cunning Little Vixen on the cusp of old age in 1922 and there is something deeply elegiac about it. In a letter to Kamila Stösslová dated the 10th of February that year he writes wistfully “I have begun writing The Cunning Little Vixen. A merry thing with a sad end: I am taking up a place at that sad end myself ……and I so belong there”."

Douglas Cooksey enjoys The Cunning Little Vixen at Garsington Opera at Wormsley. Read the Full review HERE in Opera Today

Interesting aside : How does Oliver Knussen's Higgelty Piggelty Pop ! compare to The Cunning Little Vixen ? Both operas are whimsical, but both pack a punch. Red in Tooth and Claw? Claire Booth and Lucy Schaufer star in both. Read more about Knussen's Higgelty Piggelty Pop! HERE.


Photo: Clive Barda, Garsington Opera at Wormsley.

Cunning Vixen and Scheherazade, Sisters: Hrůša BBCSO Barbican

Many performers get attention because their youth excites some sections of the press. But Jakub Hrůša has solid experience without attracting the media circus. He's Music Director of the Prague  Philharmonia and has conducted all over the world. He's recorded extensively for Supraphon. He's Music Director of Glyndebourne Touring Opera, which is a significant force on its own. I first heard Hrůša conduct Mozart Don Giovanni at the Glyndebourne Festival in 2010 and was even more impressed by his Britten Turn of the Screw in 2011   No chance would I miss hearing him conduct the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican, London.

Surprisingly, publicity for this concert was very low profile, especially given that Hrůša, a Czech music specialist,  was conducting the British premiere of František Jílek's arrangement of the suite of Leoš Janáček's The Cunning Little Vixen. Jílek (1913-93) was one of the important Czech conductors of his time, closely associated with Brno, Janáček's home turf. Jílek and Charles Mackerras were men of the same generation, but Mackerras dominated Janáček performance in the west, and Jílek remained behind the Iron Curtain. Although Talich's orchestral suite on The Cunning Little Vixen is better known, and in the Mackerras revision, Jílek's suite deserves more attention.

Jílek based his suite on the whole opera, whereas  Talich concentrated on the first act. Jílek used Janáček's original orchestrations and concentrated on the non-vocal aspects of the work. Jílek chose carefully, including passages from the scene where the Vixen comes to sexual maturity. If The Cunning Little Vixen was informed by Janáček's relationsips with women, this passage is crucial to meaning. Please read my article Janáček's Dangerous Women and many other articles I've written about this opera, (use labels below). Jílek also emphasizes the transformation music in the finale, where the Forester dies, and is reunited in spirit with the Vixen. This section is in many ways, the whole point of the opera, for it links themes of rebirth, regeneration and the cycle of Nature. The Cunning Little Vixen marks the beginning of the most fertile phase of Janáček's creative career, so Jílek's Suite works as a study of the opera and of the composer himself.

Like most Czech musicians, Jakub Hrůša probably imbibed Janáček from birth, but he's able to assert an individual stamp on his performance. He thrusts the music forward, yet marks the breaks with sharp definition.  This creates a combination of attack and tension, an angular energy that expresses the spirit of the Vixen, an animal who lives by her wits, surrounded by danger.  Conductor body language can often be "read": Hrůša points both hands downwards, fingers angled like a toreador, marking his point so it's unmistakeable. Later, he cups both palms in a rounded gesture, releasing the elegant lyricism in the finale, so it's illuminated like a halo. 

Another reason this concert was interesting was the world premiere of Rolf Hind's most extensive work to date, The Tiniest House of Time, for accordion and orchestra, with James Crabbe as soloist. "The accordion is cast as shaman-magician, party-animal, healer, rabble rouser" says Hind. Hence, perhaps the lively but controlled cacophony, wacky, swaying rhythms. Hollow metal sounds, folk-like bells, deep booming basses and low brass.  Three of the four sections are inspired by Persian poets (Rumi and Kabir), so the suggestion of dervish dance is prescient.  For me, the relationship between accordion and orchestra was paramount.  An accordion functions when air is squeezed through its chambers, shaping and elongating sound. The keys are played like a form of piano. Hind uses wind instruments to extend the idea of breathing, and strings and harmonium to reflect the idea of tinkling keys. Later in the piece, the string players hit the air with their bows, using invisble air just as the accordion does. The sound is only just audible, but the connection is clear. Hind's instrumentation also calls for wind whips, which create whirring noises when they're waved by the percussionists. The concept works fine as sound, but distracts visually.

More vaguely Persian exoticism in Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade op35 (1888) which followed, rather eclipsing Rolf Hind, whose work would have fared better in a more contemporary programme.  Scheherazade is so ubiquitous that everyone knows it, even if only through movies and TV ads.  In the concert hall, this poses a challenge. How to make it sound fresh and original? Hrůša's approach was to conduct it as if it were entirely new, its ideas undimmed by familiarity. Colours are kept scrupulously clean, so they dazzle. Hrůša and the BBCSO bring out the vivacious sparkle in the music. Scheherzade's tales are beautiful, but if she doesn't outwit the Sultan he will kill her, like he's killed so many women before. So the sour note in the woodwinds is perceptive, reminding us that beneath this glamour lies danger.

The solo violin (Stephen Bryant) and harp (Sionead Williams) mingle flirtatiously, but is this a duet or a duel?  Hrůša doesn't stint on the hyper-romantic luxury in the score, but does not muddy it in indulgent swoon. Details are carefully observed, like the military rat-a tat-tat of the small drum, supported by tambourine. These lovely tales unfold against a backdrop of fear.  Hrůša shows that Scheherazade and the Cunning Little Vixen are sisters, both using their charms to survive in dangerous environments.

Listen to this concert on 2nd December at 2 pm and for 7 days after on BBC Radio 3

Janáček - The Cunning Little Vixen on film

The Glyndebourne production of Janáček's The Cunning Little Vixen can be seen in cinemas and on the Guardian website on Sunday 10th. Janáček was inspired by cartoon illustrations, but the opera is by no means a cartoon opera. It's gloriously happy, but happiness does not preclude irony, or even much darker thoughts. The Vixen is captured and mistreated. She fights back and tears the Cock to pieces. She's red of tooth and claw, and "Red" in the political sense, too, because she tells the hen protelariat to revolt. In nature, animals are free, not institutionalized like hens in a coop.  There's nothing cute or infantilized about Janáček's Cunning Little Vixen.

Perhaps it's best not to know the opera when watching the Melly Still production, so it can be enjoyed on its own terms. But those who care about the opera, and about the composer, might want to delve a bit more deeply. Nobody needs to know an opera to enjoy it, but making judgements involves a bit more. Hearing the opera in Czech is essential, because Janáček's entire idiom derives from the Czech language, and its unusual stresses and sibilants. In English the music is castrated, and translations often try to be funny and soften the impact. Read the libretto carefully and hear how the edgy, angular music works against sentimentality. When the Fox courts the Vixen, he fancies her because she's a "Modern Woman, my ideal". He hopes she smokes! Definitely advanced for the era. "Foxy" in the modern sense, not a fox from nature. We know she won't survive because foxes don't and the trap is laid before our eyes. Then, when the Vixen dies, she's dead. The music rises again, triumphantly, when the Forester dies, because he's free now of stifling convention, at one at last with some greater cycle of nature. Whoever sings the Forester doesn't need a luxuriously Romantic voice: much better a singer with character and wit, because the Forester is a gruff, unfussy man. A lot like Janáček himself. Read John Tyrell's biography. It's long but genuinely erudite and perceptive, the essential Janáček tool.  

The Cunning Little Vixen is hard to stage because the characters are animals and act as animals do, but speak for humanity. In theory, dressing them as animnals is no big deal since it's plainly obvious that they are singing, and animals don't sing. By far more important is to understand what they are singing about. Each animal has a purpose. The Vixen grabs "Uncle" Badger's lair (itself an oblique allusion to several things). The Dog is sexually frustrated and denatured, just like the Schoolmaster and possibly the Priest. Sharp characterization above all, I think, so the fundamental grittiness of this plot and its music don't get lost behind the charm. Good filming probably helps too, because it narrows focus onto the personality of the characters, and cuts away irrelevant busyness.

Highly recommnded is the DVD of the Opéra Bastille, Paris production from 2008, directed by Don Kent. (get it here). Read Jim Sohre's review in Opera Today.  The animals are costumed as simply as possible, so they look like animals but not in a gimmicky way.The chickens in this production are dressed in colours like white hens, fluffed up and fussied. In the Paris production, the hens are surreal, because they are "un"natural. Watch how sharp their movements are, and how savagely the Vixen kills the Cock (even though we see no blood). The farmyard's a bit like a prison yard, which is how it feels for the Vixen. The passage of time and seasons is harmonized by a railway track which moves from the Forester's home out into woods and meadows.  One of the most memorable images of this production are the vistas of sunflowers, as perky and unreal as in a cartoon, but suggesting wide, open spaces, sunshine and endless horizons. Later, winter comes and the set turns white. The fox cubs prance about but look vulnerable against the stark horizon, a reminder of how easily they can be killed. Singing and orchestral playing good, too. So the more we listen and watch, the better we understand how the opera works. (Please see my many other posts on Janáček and on The Cunning Little Vixen)

photos© Opéra national de Paris/ Christian Leiber

Vixen de-fanged - Glyndebourne Janáček The Cunning Little Vixen

Glyndebourne's 2012 season started in great style with Leoš Janáček's The Cunning Little Vixen. Its rapturous reception would suggest that this could become a Glyndebourne perennial.  Inspired by a novella illustrated by cartoons, the story of Vixen Sharp Ears has great charm. The production glows with gorgeous colours, on stage and in the pit. Vladimir Jurowski conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra with lustrous style: you can hear the "birds" in the score, feel the sunshine and thrill to the starlit night sky in the final scene.

The Cunning Little Vixen is about nature, but it's not naturalistic. Janáček observed nature closely, but doesn't write about animals so much as about human nature. Thus the intense gemstone colours of Tom Pye's designs dazzle gloriously. Like the World Ash Tree in Wagner's Ring, a huge construction looms over the stage. It's a tree which changes with the seasons : spring blossom, autumn golds, bare winter branches. Since one of the themes in this opera is the passing of time, the tree is a natural metaphor. There's a slide behind it from which animals pop up and observe. Later, it's shown as the lair in which the foxes live. This vividness reflects Jurowski's approach to the music. Although Jurowski softens the sharper edges of Janáček's idiom, he creates surges so lush that he brings out the vigorous life force that's fundamental to the meaning of this opera. The Vixen dies, the Forester grows old, but nature renews itself each year, and the grandchildren of foxes and frogs continue the cycle of life.

 "Kontrapunkte, Kontrapunkte", the Forester (Sergei Leiferkus) tells the Schoolmaster (Adrian Thompson)  He's explaining that the dry old schoolmaster's not right for a woman like Terinka. It's a wry joke, not something a woodsman would say, but a composer might. Perhaps Janáček identified with the Schoolmaster, withering away without love. Significantly, he found new creative momentum in old age, when he met Camila Stösslová. Janáček is quite explicit about what makes the sap rise in human beings. "How many children do we have, dear?" asks the Fox of the Vixen. "We'll make many more".

In this production, one of the finest scenes is the one where the Fox (Emma Bell) courts the Vixen (Lucy Crowe), just as a formal, old-fashioned formal couple might have done in Janáček's youth. "May I call upon you?" he asks, and she responds coyly. Very decorous. Animals don't beat around the bush like that.  Janáček then becomes even more daring. "Do you smoke?" asks the Fox. Is the Vixen A Modern Woman, emacipated like Stösslová, and not domesticated like Zdenka,  the composer's wife? The Vixen lives independently (in a treehouse inherited from "Uncle Badger" (Mischa Schelomianski). "My ideal woman!" cries the Fox. There are cryptic personal meanings in The Cunning Little Vixen which can easily be missed. Please see my piece "Janáček, Cunning Vixen and Subversion". The scene isn't heavily scored, so the words carry weight and Jurowski lets them be heard clearly, Then, when the mood shifts, orchestral textures become more dense, even sinister.  Listen for the triumphant finale, which could be sheer Hollywood (though it was written long before film had sound). As life ebbs from the Forester's body, his spirit breaks free. You can imagine Janáček joyfully defying convention. The Forester doesn't die with "The Old Woman", his wife (Jean Rigby) but with the spirit of the Vixen and her wild ways.

Sergei Leiferkus's Forester is outstanding, created with real vigour. He's of course an extremely experienced singer, but he's also a strong actor with a wonderful sense of humour. He does Shostakovich satires with panache. In 2010, he sang Edward German's Who were the Yeomen of England at the reconstruction of a 1910 Prom. He sang with a heavy accent, but with such glee that it felt more sincere than any dour, irony-free performance. Adrian Thomnpson, as the Schoolmaster/Mosquito, was sadly underused. He can sing Czech better than most Englishmen, and has done a lot of Janáček, including the difficult The Eternal Gospel. (more here). He deserves a higher profile. Lucy Crowe as The Vixen was clear. pert and spirited, as a good Vixen should be.

This Glyndebourne The Cunning Little Vixen is great entertainment, and orchestrally rewarding. It's let down, however, by direction that's less incisive. While Janáček defines the roles vividly, Melly Still turns characters into caricatures. Dressing humans as animals is almost as tricky as dressing animals as humans. From time to time, the cast move like animals, but that's not enough. The focus should be on who the animals really represent. Partly the problem lies in the costumes (Dinah Collin) which make it hard to realise who's who unless you've read the synopsis.

But the bigger problem is that the parts are given no personality. The weakest scene in this production occurs in the hen coop where the Vixen tries to get the chickens to rebel against male dominance. It can be literally "red of claw and tooth" because the Vixen tears the Cock apart. Here, though, it's so tame you could miss it among the busy babble going round the stage. The dancers are nice, but they don't add much. Yet the Cock, Hens and The Dog are all crucial to the deeper meaning of this opera.  Even the Vixen isn't well developed. When the Vixen discovers the mystery of sex, poor Lucy Crowe pushes up her blouse in an unsubtle attempt to look "sexy". Yet what Janáček has been telling us all along is that nature is instinct, not appearance, and that instincts win. When these darker, more radical aspects of the opera aren't defined,  The Cunning Little Vixen loses its bite. And what is a Vixen without fangs? (photos : Bill Cooper)
HERE is a link to the review in Opera Today.

Janáček, Cunning Vixen and subversion

"How can animals talk?" My Dad asked my three year old brother. The kid thought seriously for a moment, then said with great solemnity. "Only when they wear clothes".  That's the perennial problem posed by Leoš Janáček's The Cunning Little Vixen, which starts the new Glyndebourne season this weekend. On a very superficial level, one might assume that the opera is a nature tale, since it's based on very shrewd observation of animal behaviour. We live in technologically cocooned urban times. Ninety years ago, Janáček and his contemporaries were a lot closer to the countryside and to nature. In any case, Janáček was inspired by a cartoon series in a newspaper.  So from the very start, The Cunning Little Vixen was allegory, not fairy tale. If you think it's cute and Disneyfied, the joke is on you! (photo : Peter Trimming)

For Janáček, The Cunning Little Vixen is satire. One of the most powerful themes in the opera is the way animals co-exist with humans, rather like a subculture on the margins of society.  A good metaphor. Foxes adapt. In Soho, for example, thousands of urban foxes dine on the discards of exotic restaurants, and retire to the Royal Parks for rest and recreation. Foxes can't be domesticated. Perhaps thee real clue to the meaning of The Cunning Little Vixen lies in Janáček's relationships with women which I've written about many times (like this Janáček's Dangerous Women). Women represent society and social mores. Janáček fell in love with 14 year old Zdenka Schulzová, a "vixen" so innocent and unworldy that he didn't connect her to what her family represented: solid middle class respectability, and Germanophile, (ie authority) for that matter. He was poor, Czech and an outsider, yet the family took him in and supported them, even when the composer wanted a divorce (extremely scandalous in those days). Yet Zdenka never ceased to love him, though he treated her and their daughter abominably (possibly hastening Olga's death).

Significantly, Janáček didn't leave Zdenka. There's evidence that he still slept with her late in life. And the fact that he pursued women who were not available to him speaks volumes. Was he more into pursuit than entrapment? Had Stösslová responded, would he have suddenly turned tail, all fervent protestations to the contrary? Philanderers often need an excuse not to commit, however flowery their passioins. So The Cunning LittleVixen affirms the values of non-domestication. Is "Vixen Sharp Ears" Zdenka as she might have been, and also Janáček's psychological rationale for not setting up home with Stösslová or anyone else? (he may have slept with others). From The Diary of One Who Disappeared, Janáček is fascinated by feral women. Notice that Terynka is a gypsy. Significantly both the song cycle and the opera were inspired by newspapers, for adults. Janáček anthromorphizes, and transposes dangerous feelings.

That's why The Cunning Little Vixen is so free and so joyous. Janáček is indulging his anarchic side, merrily sending up the stultifying convention he couldn't shake off in real life. Thus the music is exhilarating, full of energy and wit, It leaps and dances like a pack of playful young foxes who haven't yet learned fear. This opera was one of the composer's favourites because he could poke fun at the human world and its foibles. The Vixen mocks the conformist hens who sell their souls for comfortable living. Like many women, and men, too, for that matter. The Dog is miserable because he's unnaturally celibate - like the Priest and Schoolmaster. The Poacher gets married and the Gamekeeper returns to the forest. The opera ends, not in misery, but in glorious triumph. Just as the vixen lives on, so do the frogs, insects, trees and other organisms. Is the Gamekeeper really alone? Whether he dies or not, he's at last at one with the eternal cycle of growth and renewal. So he and the Vixen have the last laugh after all.

One of the reasons I'm so fond of the 1954 Komische Oper Berlin production (Das schlaue Füchslein) conducted by Vaclav Neumann and directed by Walter Felsenstein is because it was made just after the war, not long after the Soviet Occupation, and under Communism.  (watch clips here and here) That audience would have known all about surviving in harsh conditions, and also about the consequences of conforming to rigid authority. They were fooled by "realism". The original artiist and the composer didn't see it realistically, either. The animals look like human beings, dressed up in corny costumes, which is a telling comment on regimes of all kinds. It's kitsch, but howlingly funny because it's subversive, playing along with convention but sending it up. Like Janáček, that audience could let off steam without getting into trouble. Like crafty urban foxes, those Berliners meant to survive.

Please see my numerous other posts on Janáček (more Felsenstein links, photos etc) and related subjects. My work is original so please don't borrow my ideas without acknowledgement.