The Cunning Little Vixen
Opera in three acts by Leoš Janáček
Libretto by the composer
German text by Werner Hintze
Tickets
An opera with a vixen in the title role, which takes place amongst crickets, frogs, hens, dogs, badgers, and all manner of creatures, and which also seeks to tell a serious, even philosophical tale with these characters – whichever way you consider it, such an opera is an impossibility. At least, that is the conclusion any hardened theatre expert would have come to before sincerely advising Janácek against undertaking any such a venture. But luckily the composer thought otherwise and simply got to work. The result of his labour, all too often misunderstood and staged as a twee children's opera, is a deeply moving meditation on human existence and its highs and lows, its brief moments of happiness, its unquenchable sadness at the transience of all living things, and the deep solace the seventy-year-old composer found in his awareness of life's ever regenerating power.