The Cunning Little Vixen
JWi/9, JW1/9 · “Příhody Lišky Bystroušky”
On a summer afternoon in the Czech forest, a gamekeeper finds an orphaned fox cub and takes her home to amuse his children. But Sharp Ears the vixen is no man’s pet. She’s a wild animal, a free spirit, and as she makes her escape she takes the world on no terms but her own—embracing life in all its messy, dangerous, joyous complexity. Premiered in 1924, Janáček’s opera The Cunning Little Vixen is every bit as irrepressible: adapted from a cartoon strip in a Prague newspaper, and giving a vivid and startlingly original musical voice to foxes, frogs, birds, badgers, crickets and even (a few steps behind, and overthinking things that are obvious to a gnat) humans. It ought to be twee, but it’s the opposite: Janáček knows his characters too well to sentimentalise them. Sharp Ears is fierce, impulsive and unapologetic, gleefully slaughtering a whole farmyard full of chickens and unable to remember how many cubs she’s had. Well, naturally: she’s a fox. It’s the humans (and they really are all-too-human) who insist on making things complicated, although in The Cunning Little Vixen humanity is part of the same eternal cycle of nature, and the bristling humour and aching beauty of Janáček’s music creates a world where happiness and sorrow are merely different facets of the sheer, unquenchable wonder of being alive.
