PLEASE NOTE CHANGE OF DATES

27th February, 1st, 2nd and 3rd March 2010

The Pleasance Theatre, Edinburgh

Production team:

Director: Nicholas Bone
Musical Director: Jessica Cottis
Assistant Musical Director: Nicholas Fletcher
Assistant Director: George Ransley
Producer: Nick Morris

Cast:

Forester – Simon Philips (27th Feb, 1st, 2nd March), Alex Knox (3rd March)
Forester’s Wife – Anna Churchill
Schoolmaster – Francis Powlesland
Parson – Gareth McGuigan
Haraschta, the Poacher – Jerome Knox
Pasek, the Innkeeper – Andrew Bennett
Mrs. Pasek – Laura Reading
Franzl – Colleen Nicoll
Seppl – Meghan Ghent

Vixen – Louise Alder
Fox – Suzanne McGrath
Dog – Olivia Nathan
Cock – Laura Reading
Headhen – Colleen Nicoll
Cricket – Lusanda Donnelly
Grasshopper – Katie Tobin
Frog – Naomi Baker
Woodpecker – Julia Fuchs
Mosquito – Andrew Bennett
Badger – Jerome Knox
Owl – Colleen Nicoll
Jay – Lusanda Donnelly

Hens, Fox Cubs, Forest Animals:

Naomi Baker
Andrew Bennett
Lusanda Donnelly
Julia Fuchs
Meghan Ghent
Emily Goad
Alice Hunter
Marta LisbetLoman
Tim Martin
Gareth McGuigan
Emma Middleton
Amelia Smith
Katie Tobin

Book now: Tickets available from 1st January from (secretary@edinburghstudioopera.com) or 07551932767

What is often viewed as a Czech version of Shakespeare’s masterpiece ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Leoš Janáček composed The Cunning Little Vixen by turning a serial comic strip in a 1920s local newspaper into one of his most touching and inventive operas. The ingenious story tells the adventures of Vixen Sharp-Ears set in a world populated by humans as well as forest and barnyard animals.

This wonderful opera is a masterful amalgam of operatic dialogue, songs, chorus, wordless singing, ballet, mime, and orchestral interludes. He combines the mythic, the tragic and the comic, creating a philosophical reflection on the cycle of life and death. It is one of the 20th century’s most imaginative excursions into a fantasy.

Synopsis:

Act 1

In the forest, the animals and insects are playing and dancing around. The Forester enters and lies down against a tree for a nap. A curious Vixen Cub inquisitively chases a frog right into the lap of the surprised forester who forcibly takes her home as a pet. Time passes (in the form of an orchestral interlude) and we see the Vixen, now grown to a young adult, tied up in the forester’s yard with the conservative old dachshund. Fed up with life in confinement, the vixen chews through her rope, attacks the chickens, and hops the fence to freedom.

Act 2

The vixen takes over a badger’s home and kicks him out. In the inn, the pastor, forester, teacher and schoolmaster drink and talk about their mutual infatuation with the gypsy girl Terynka. The drunken schoolmaster leaves the inn and mistakes a sunflower that the vixen is hiding behind for Terynka and confesses his devotion to her. The forester, also on his way home, sees the vixen and fires two shots at her, sending her running. Later, the vixen, coming into her womanhood, meets a charming boy fox, and they retire to the badger’s home. An unexpected pregnancy and a forest full of gossipy creatures necessitate their marriage, which rounds out the act.

Act 3

The poacher Harasta is engaged to Terynka and is out hunting in preparation for their marriage. He sets a fox trap, which the numerous vixen cubs mock. Harasta, watching from a distance, shoots and kills the vixen, sending her children running. At Harasta’s wedding, the forester sees the vixen’s fur, which Harasta gave to Terynka as a wedding present, and flees to the forest to reflect. He returns to the place where he met the vixen, and sits at the tree grieving the loss of both the vixen and Terynka. His grief grows until, just as in the beginning of the opera, a frog unexpectedly jumps in his lap, the grandson of the one who did so in act one. This reassurance of the cycle of death leading to new life gives his heart a deep peace.

About the opera:

According to Janáček’s servant, Marie Stejskalová, it was her laughing at the newspaper cartoons of the adventures of Vixen Sharp-Ears that drew her master to the subject of Příhody Lišky Bystroušky. The popular newspaper Lidové noviny had commissioned Rudolf Tĕsnohlídek to write a novel to be serialised, which was to be based around a series of drawings by Stanislav Lolek telling the tale of the adventures of Vixen Sharp-Ears.

Tĕsnohlídek’s novel became the basis for the libretto. Janáček began work by meeting with the author and beginning a study of animals. With this understanding of the characters involved, his own 70 years of life experience, and an undying, unrequited love for the much younger, married Kamila Stösslová, he began work on the opera. Writing his own libretto, he transformed himself into the forester, Kamila into the vixen and Terynka and the originally comedic cartoon into a philosophical reflection on the cycle of life and death by including the death of the vixen. As with other operas by older composers, this late opera shows a deep understanding of life leading to a return to simplicity.

Janáček moves away from pure traditionalism by pioneering a fantastic musical language for the forest, based on his ‘notebook’ of animal sounds and a bitter sweet lyricism for the Vixen and the Fox. These stylistic innovations are married with a moving pantheistic close where the Forester realises, in one of Janáček’s most tender passages that nature has a cyclical basis, which goes much beyond the traditional mirrors of the fairy-tale opera genre, such as found in Dvořák’s Rusalka. It has, unsurprisingly received a large number of performances across the world.

Despite the vixen’s death at the end of the work, it is arguably Janáček’s lightest opera, and musically it stands in contrast to the often brutally serious nature of operas such as Jenůfa and Káťa Kabanová.