The Cunning Little Vixen Programme notes

Programme notes I wrote for my production of The Cunning Little Vixen, Grimeborn Festival, 2017.

On directing the drama

The Cunning Little Vixen is Janacek's most charming opera. I have loved it for many years, but in directing it - getting to know it from the "inside out" alongside this marvellous cast - my admiration for it has only grown.

The musical beauties of the score are obvious, and each person will have their list of favourite moments when hearing it for a first or fiftieth time. Dramatically though, the piece is very strangely constructed: central characters are introduced for the first time in the second and third acts, and individual scenes or episodes are often incredibly short, like comic book panels, or even film scenes, a genre which was still finding its feet as Janacek was writing his operas. The comic book comparison is of course apposite because Janacek got the idea for The Cunning Little Vixen from a popular Czech newspaper comic of the time by Rudolf Těsnohlídek, and based his libretto on it. Janacek also intersperses the opera with many dance sequences or 'pantomimes' as he refers to them, and I have worked hard with the choreographer to ensure that these feel like an organic part of the story telling, rather than diversions from the main thrust of the piece.

What we discovered in rehearsals was that it wasn't just the larger construction that was fast paced, but that also within scenes, Janacek's terseness is incredibly tough to live up to - the rate of new events, both musical and dramatic, is extraordinary, surely the fastest in all opera, and for the singing actor, the timing has to be immaculately controlled to make it convincing dramatically. This quick pace can also make the piece difficult to follow, so we have worked hard to tell the story of each scene as clearly as possible - I've lost count of the number of Vixens I have left not quite understanding why people were doing what they were doing. Though all the characters are drawn with exquisite sensitivity and humour, interestingly, it is the humans that are most elliptical, isolated and hard to understand, the dialogue halting between gawky jokes, ruminations that are hard to find a source for, oblique cultural references, and moments of shared meaning which we are given only the smallest amount of context for. It is the animal world that has the most emotional clarity, and clearest dramatic arcs. Janacek's stage directions, all too often ignored, often provide vital clues as to the meaning of a potentially ambiguous passage.

There are conventional elements of course, chiefly a central love duet of breathtaking beauty and sensitivity. But it's rare that operas show us not just the path of romantic love from infatuation (via frustration) to sexual consummation, but further on to love's fulfilment and final consummation in children and family. This after all is Nature's reason for the gift of love and sexuality - to ensure that we reproduce and repeat the cycle! That we get to see the Vixen's whole life from fox cub to parent is quite extraordinary then, and central to Janacek's intention for the piece. It is exactly this which sparks the Forester's redemptive final scene, the blazing chords of the ending a wordless paean to nature's wondrous beauty and endless renewal.

Another fascinating part of the puzzle is the up to the minute (for 1923) political references, mainly made by the animals, which come usually to great comic effect. The delicious image of a fox using the language of liberation and equality to incite a revolution amongst the hens against the patriarchal rooster, is so striking and prescient a critique of communist rhetoric that it's hard to imagine a more brilliantly simple one. But there's always a twist, a smiling irony that doesn't allow for picking sides. Not so stupid as they seem, the hens won't have any of the Vixen's talk, preferring to stay with the Rooster. But then it is his hubris, vanity and need to prove himself that leads to his demise. Later, in the love duet, female independence is extolled as the highest virtue, and then it is the Vixen that is the clear leader in the face of danger. Underlying all these contemporary references is a deeper source of parody and humour - that the political movements du jour should be trotted out by members of the timeless animal kingdom is absurd - under the surface we are aware that we are also a part of the animal kingdom. The idea that we might transcend or discredit the effectively infinite depth of 500 million years of vertebrate evolution with a mere intellectual idea, when our bodies, minds, senses, thoughts, relationships and social structures have been moulded, shaped, and forged by that very evolutionary process appears laughable in this context.

This sublime and bizarre opera then is entirely nonpareil, and its relative popularity might be a bit of a shock in the context of the operatic mainstream. The secret, I am sure, is the music, which grants Janacek's characters such humour, charm, dignity, and life. Real life.

On arranging the music

Janacek has enough currency that he is no longer a cause that needs champions (as he used to be) but his work is still relatively rarely staged and less well known in comparison to his direct contemporaries Puccini and Strauss. All three composers wrote their most famous operas in roughly the same years. In some ways his music couldn't be more different from these two masters, though the influence of both is unmistakable, always fully digested and integrated into his native idiom.

The Cunning Little Vixen contains music as rapturous and gloriously generous as anything in Puccini. The difference is that Janacek tends to grant these moments of soaring exaltation to the orchestra, while the vocal lines remain rooted in speech patterns, a technique gleaned from years of notating the precise rhythms and pitches of conversations from his private life or just as often, from those overheard from passers by. It is the musical interludes of Vixen that consistently show Janacek at his most lyrically inspired, in a work that contains almost no weak passages.

From Strauss he gets the astonishing quicksilver shifts of colour and mood, all gleaned from a tiny array of fundamental motives, though the effect is again very different from the model. Strauss presents us with an opulent tapestry, a cornucopia of onomatopoeic orchestral effects and sensuous delights that attempt to overwhelm the senses and thrill the ears and loins. In contrast, Janacek constructs a mosaic, tiny shards and fragments set side by side to incredibly potent psychological and emotional effect, so brilliantly differentiated in colour, mood, texture and register that one hardly realises how closely related the sections are. This simultaneously gives him his underlying unity, and also that ineffable sense as a listener of not being given enough time with the music to fully grasp it - he shows you a glimpse of some precious gem, and already has moved on to his next treasure. But the unity is there - Vixen is a piece I have listened to for many years now, but as I was arranging the orchestral score for piano quintet I was bowled over again and again by the evolutionary flow of his musical ideas, how each develops from the last and on into the next. Very often, two contrasting ideas, a first and second subject, are actually just different iterations of the same motif. How often is it that the very compositional technique is a reflection of the subject matter of an opera!

Janacek is very much his own composer though: he has a rhythmic vitality, a gutsy, earthy quality, a sense of humour, and a soul tearing sincerity that largely eludes his more famous contemporaries. His use of hammering repetitions and ostinatos keep his music taught, alert and sometimes brutally unprettified, and his profound mastery of harmony breathes radiant new life both into the decadently overripe tonal harmonic practises of his Teutonic contemporaries, and the increasingly cliched sentimentality of the Italian school.

It's music that can be hard to grasp initially, but is compelling enough on a first listen to beckon one to return. There is endless beauty and depth to be found in his operas, and I hope very much that this production and arrangement might open a new window to Janacek's unique sound world, whether you are a first timer or an old hand.