When Leoš Janáček began composing his sixth opera The Cunning Little Vixen (Příhody Lišky Bystroušky), he was 67 years old. He was no longer seen as a provincial folklorist from Brno, as had still been the case just five years earlier. In 1916, Janáček’s standing was changed overnight by the Prague premiere of Jenůfa (Její pastorkyňa); suddenly he had become a leading representative of modern music drama alongside composers a generation younger. Premieres of his works were eagerly anticipated, and Janáček did not cease to surprise audiences with the originality of his musical language, his choices of unusual subject matter, and his genius for dramatic adaptation.
Several coincidences preceded the composing of The Cunning Little Vixen. Graphic prints had begun to appear in newspapers just a few months earlier. The editorial staff of one Brno newspaper lacked enough images submitted for publishing, so the editor-in-chief Jaromír John paid a visit to Stanislav Lolek’s Prague studio in his search for material. Lolek himself did not offer his illustrations of tales about a clever vixen to the newspaper, and when the editor John became aware of them by chance, Lolek had to be persuaded to allow their publication. Rudolf Těsnohlídek then wrote a literary companion to the series of illustrations at the urging of the newspaper publisher. The story came to Janáček’s attention thanks to the hearty laughter of his housekeeper when she was thumbing through the newspaper.
Janáček’s creative spirit had been awakened, and in May 1921, readers of the newspaper Lidové noviny learned that The Cunning Little Vixen would be dressed up in a musical setting. By that time, Janáček was already working with Těsnohlídek’s prose, which had been published in book form. He admitted later that the book made him angry, so he immediately tossed out the first chapter and went to listen to the distinctive language of woodsmen instead. It certainly is no coincidence that at that time he was jotting down the songs of birds and even frogs and writing commentary about them in essays. He took his scientific approach so far as to ask a forester in Hukvaldy to arrange an expedition for him to see a fox’s den. Janáček went there wearing his favourite white suit.
Janáček took the original literary material and adapted his own libretto. He gave Těsnohlídek’s characters greater depth, and he shifted the dramatic emphasis from the stage to the character’s internal reflections on their emotions. He gave precedence to the scenes from the original story where the animal and human worlds overlap. Through their juxtaposition, he created an allegory contrasting the unity and peace of the natural world with the banality and mediocrity of human life. By allowing Sharp-Ears the Vixen to die, he made it possible to hear his opera as a philosophical reflection on life and an expression of his pantheistic faith.
The Cunning Little Vixen is Janáček’s most symphonic opera. The animal world enriched his musical language and enabled him to conceive whole scenes in terms of ballet and pantomime. Sometimes the pithy rhythmic units imitate animal sounds, and through their onomatopoetic potential, they shift the dramatic potential to the orchestra, as is most apparent in the ballet scenes and interludes. A number of small roles for forest creatures are composed for children’s voices. Like in his previous opera Kaťa Kabanová, nature again speaks through wordless choral singing.
The score of The Cunning Little Vixen is sometimes described as impressionistic. When Janáček was composing the opera, he is known to have been captivated by the music of Claude Debussy. He had attended a performance of the opera Pelléas et Mélisande, and he subjected Debussy’s symphonic sketches La mer to detailed analysis. The use of the whole-tone scale, so typical of Debussy’s musical language, seems in Janáček’s case to be a consequence of the inspiration of Moravian folk music with its plentiful use of the Lydian mode.
In his correspondence, Janáček called The Cunning Little Vixen a girls’ novel. In it, at the threshold of the age of seventy, he created one of his most youthful works. In his own words, he composed it “for the joys and sorrows of advanced years.” Milan Kundera admired the opera for its “elegiac nostaglia”, which it found “in the chatter of two old gentlemen in a pub; in the death of a poor animal; in the unrequited love of a schoolteacher kneeling before a sunflower.” The work’s message is a humble bowing down of a man with a wealth of life experience before the all-embracing order of nature, necessary components of which are birth, death, and the renewal of life in successive generations: in the concluding scene, face to face with new generations of forest creature, the forester lets his rifle (a symbol of the human subjugation of nature) fall from his shoulder, and he recedes into the background to the sounds of one of Janáček’s most beautiful orchestral odes. It is no wonder that Janáček wanted this scene played at his own funeral.
The opera was premiered on 3 November 1924 at Brno’s Theatre on the Ramparts (today the Mahen Theatre) with František Neumann conducting. The first performance at Prague’s National Theatre followed soon afterwards (18 May 1925, Otakar Ostrčil conducting). The opera crossed international borders thanks to Max Brod’s controversial German adaptation, premiered in Mainz on 13 February 1927 with Paul Breisach conducting. A production at Berlin’s Comic Opera directed by Walter Felsenstein was given 218 performances (premiered on 30 May 1956 and conducted by Václav Neumann), starting the opera on its way to a permanent place on stages around the world. The score was first printed by Universal Edition in 1961, and Jiří Zahrádka prepared a critical edition in 2010. Today, the opera is routinely performed in the original language, so the Vixen’s charmingly mixed-up Moravian dialect has become a world language at least on the opera stage.
In the 1930s, Václav Talich prepared an orchestral suite from the opera that has made its own way in the concert hall. In arranging the suite, Talich made well-intentioned alterations to Janáček’s orchestration to make the sound more typically romantic. Half a century later, Charles Mackerras restored Janáček’s original scoring to the suite arrangement.
The Czech Philharmonic has close ties to The Cunning Little Vixen. In 1979/80, the orchestra made a superb recording of the opera under the baton of Václav Neumann with Magdaléna Hajóssyová, Gabriela Beňačková, and Richard Novák in the lead roles. Today’s performance celebrates the opera’s youthful age of 100 years on the occasion of the centenary of the first performance in Brno.
