The Cunning Little Vixen - Schedule, Program & Tickets

Opera in three acts
Libretto by Leoš Janáček based on the novella by Rudolf Těsnohlídek
German text version by Peter Brenner using the text version by Max Brod
First performed on November 6, 1924 in Brno
Premiere at the Deutsche Oper Berlin on June 30, 2000
2 hours 15 minutes / One intermission
In German with German and English surtitles
Introduction: 45 minutes before the start of the performance in the foyer on the right
Recommended for ages 10 and up
Content
Episodes from the life of the young vixen, Cunning Little Vixen, are told. The forester, who has never lost his longing for freedom and love, catches her in the forest one day and takes her home with him, because she seems to him like the embodiment of this longing. But she manages to escape. In the forest, she chases the badger out of its den and sets up her own home there. Here she also finds her great love: a gallant fox courts her, and the two spend their first night of love in her den. Finally, they celebrate their wedding among the animals of the forest. We soon see the vixen as a proud mother surrounded by her numerous cubs. But her happiness is short-lived: the little vixen Smarthead dies, hit by a bullet from the poacher Harasta. Meanwhile, the forester and the schoolmaster sit together in the bar and lament the approaching old age. The death of the vixen is particularly bitter for the forester. He cannot forget her unbridled nature, her thirst for freedom and her youth. In the forest, a strange, magical atmosphere greets him and he nods off. Then, like a vision, a young vixen appears to him, the spitting image of his mother. Life triumphs over transience. A circle closes.

"I made the little vixen like the devil catches flies - when he has nothing better to do. I wrote the little vixen for the forest and for the sadness of my later years," Leoš Janáček once wrote. But his opera THE CUNNING LITTLE VIXEN is not the melancholy review of the life of an old man who is closer to death than life. Although the composer was already approaching his seventies, he created a work full of comedy and poetry. He contrasted the "sadness of his later years" with a cheerful, melancholy animal fairy tale that does not exclude death any more than the comforting certainty that in nature new life always arises from decay.

The material is based on a serial novel by Rudolf Těsnohlídek, illustrated with drawings by the painter Stanislav Lolek, which appeared in the Brno daily newspaper "Lidové noviny" from 1920. The composer wrote the libretto himself, and the entire opera was finally completed in January 1924. It was composed as an impressionistic sound structure made up of subtly orchestrated short scenes and episodes, connected by a total of nine orchestral preludes and transformations that structure the work musically and dramaturgically. Despite all the proximity to impressionism and the music of his great role model Debussy, Janáček's musical language remains unmistakable: like hardly anyone else, he was able to develop music from speech melodies. Leitmotif-like sequences can be followed throughout the work without strict execution. Also characteristic are the folk-song-like, never folkloristic elements of the music, as well as its distinctive rhythmic structure, through which even the beguiling melody takes on its unmistakable character.

"Katharina Thalbach's production is teeming with ideas like a forest floor with animals. Sometimes you hardly know where to look first, and afterwards you want to tell everyone about the snail or the grumpy badger with his pipe, but then you decide not to, so as not to spoil the astonished surprise for the others. In addition, Ezio Toffolutti's stage sets conjure up the forest weaving or the full moon night as if they were taken from a lovingly illustrated children's book." (Berliner Zeitung)

Subject to change.