Author : Jos Hermans
Leoš Janáček never wrote anything to order and the path to a composition was always linked to the need to convey something essential by musical means. So we find The Cunning Little Vixen vibrating with life and energy, with youthful wildness and desire for freedom and happiness and at the same time speaking of resignation to the cycle of birth, mating and death. "I wrote The Vixen for the forest and for the sadness of my late years," writes the composer to his 37-year younger muse Kamila Stösslová. The forest is the magical setting where man and animal experience love, and the music the composer devised for his joyful-melancholic animal fable listens to that nature. It is full of impatience and speaks of sexual desire. The animality in nature acts erotically stimulating to the people (a forester, a school teacher, a pastor, a poacher). All are under the spell of the wild and irresistible but absent gypsy woman Terynka.
Director Barrie Kosky wanted no furs, no animal tails and no masks on stage for the familiar four-legged and feathered friends of the barnyard. No mimetic imitations either. Insects are as good as banned from the piece and quite a few details of the score disappear into a scenic vacuum. However, the only scene where Kosky conforms to the more classical performance practice - the massacre in the henhouse - is the most successful. Only the animals have color, contrasting with the black attire of the people. It is as if the people have something to learn from the animals.
Kosky again uses a strongly reduced stage, a formula with which he was very successful in Macbeth (Zurich), Pelléas et Mélisande (Strasbourg), Duke Bluebeard's Castle (Frankfurt), West Side Story (Berlin). The focus then becomes entirely on the singers' playing and on some striking scenographic discoveries which seem to magnify themselves through their uniqueness. So, this Cunning Little Vixen has not become a Moravian animal fable, but even in the hands of Kosky and his team it remains a delightful work.
A clanging church bell accompanies a short prologue : a father buries his daughter. Kosky has wanted to make the forester and the Vixen a father-daughter relationship. He probably does so with a nod to Janáček's biography. It is clear that the composer saw himself in the character of the forest ranger. Both his daughter Olga and his son Vladimir die young. Olga's death would leave him with a feeling of guilt for years. Wolfgang Koch's forester has natural authority, kindness, a sense of poetry and above all, a heart for nature and its wildlife. He no longer seems to know the high tension eroticism once brought into his life. When he turns his gaze inward and then to the auditorium, we understand that he is acting from his memory.
The scenographic find in this case is a curtain of lamé. The light-reflecting garlands hold the scene imprisoned in a constant spell. At the same time, they add something of a nightclub atmosphere: the forest as tinseltown. It shows itself in different guises: as a Las Vegas wall of bright red passion after the first lovemaking of the fox couple, as a snowy landscape in the third act, and provided with blood red strands after the death of the Fox.
Divine are the downy hens with bright yellow wigs and red gloves. The rooster is an animal trainer with a tube hat and belle époque mustache. Fragmented female legs fly around after the slaughter in the henhouse. A hyperventilating chick traversing the stage is part of the director's familiar arsenal of humor.
The schoolteacher and the pastor are very much on the bottle; their sexual obsessions, on the other hand, are given little profile. There is, for example, the brief scene in which the drunken schoolmaster falls to his knees and declares his love to a sunflower in which he thinks he recognizes the apple of his eye, Terynka; here the scene does not come into its own as the men are mostly up to their waists, in a recess in the stage floor and therefor quasi immobilized,. Another Kosky joke are the women's legs simulating a copulation ballet through the cabaret-like curtain. In his final monologue the forester sweeps up the leaves with a broom , the very epitome of resignation!
Elena Tsallagova and Angela Brower make the fox duet the vocal highlight of the evening with their evenly matched sopranos. Tsallagova also brings an admirable enthusiasm to her hyper-kinetic playing. The forester is a role well suited to Wolfgang Koch's personality and voice. Martin Snell sings the pastor with a, attractive baritone timbre.
With Robert Jindra, the orchestral direction is once again in the hands of a Czech conductor with Janáček experience. That's usually a good thing. The prelude and the very first scene with the forester, perhaps the most progressive in the piece musically speaking, hits Janáček right in the heart. The typical colors of the Janáček orchestra will not escape anyone: the piccolos, the low brass, the timpani in the third act. Dynamically this is all captivatingly performed by the first class orchestra of the Bavarian State Opera. The magisterial fanfare of the final pages sounds here as foreshadowing the at that time not yet written finale of The Makropulos Affair. It is with this hymn to nature and to life that Janáček had himself buried on August 15, 1928. This was done at his express wish. A great man, this initially provincial composer who managed to elevate the national folk soul of his country to a universal theme!
Watch the show on Staatsoper TV with English or German subtitles.