Staatstheater Cottbus | »The Cunning Little Vixen«: A Rejection of the Idyll

A vixen as an operatic heroine? That's not the only unusual thing about Leoš Janáček's opera. A continuous plot is missing. In the first act, the young vixen is captured by the forester but refuses to be kept as a pet. She escapes, only to meet and fall in love with a young fox in the second act. By the third act, there are already many little vixens. But once, the vixen isn't at all clever, provokes a poacher, and is promptly killed.

Milan Kundera described the opera as a "heartbreaking idyll," and that captures many of its features. The community of forest animals is idyllic, its ballet interludes musical; the fox's love story touching. Yet there are counter-scenes from the human world, with the forester and his companions. They depict a coexistence in the provinces, where people know each other and exchange more or less good-natured taunts without being entirely malicious. These people age fairly gracefully; children are absent on the human level. Nature, on the other hand, continually restores itself. At the end, the forester meets one of the fox's daughters, whom he intends to raise better; but he is distracted by a frog who, like one in the first scene, jumps on his nose and stammers that that was Grandpa.

Eternal nature as the consolation of finite humanity – this could already be suspected of ideology at the premiere in 1924, and has become completely problematic a good century later. The Cottbus production thus rejects the idyllic forest. At the center of the action (set design: Natascha von Steiger) rises a slanted wooden surface, bordered by a picket fence that seems to have been improvised and nailed together. This seems both provisional and deliberately ugly. From the very beginning, nature is broken, and at this very beginning, an act of violence occurs: the abduction of the vixen.

On the one hand, that's true, and Armin Petras's production emphasizes this. Forester, forester's wife, innkeeper, schoolmaster—in his production, they're all evil. In the final act, for some reason, the innkeeper lies around as a corpse, and an imaginary policeman grooms the forester's dog. Is that social criticism? In any case, along with the idyll, it also eliminates the heartbreaking quality that Kundera attributed to the opera. And with that, any sympathy for these brutes disappears. May they grow old and—hopefully soon—die: so much the better!

The music doesn't have it easy here. Janáček went to great lengths to convey the finest emotional nuances with his speech melodies. The direction leaves little room for this. The protagonists of the human world sound accordingly. Andreas Jäpel as the forester has impressive vocal power and sings the text with exceptional intelligibility, but he is unable to convey the many aspects of his character. Yes, the forester steals the vixen by force; but no, he remains fascinated by the freedom-loving animal. In the final scene, in which the forester confronts his aging, Jäpel finds finer nuances; but the director had previously defined the character too much for it to be believed that he could undergo any further transformation. Moreover, part of the scene is again overloaded with video projections (Maria Tomoiagǎ), just as they had previously reduced the extended orchestral passages to accompanying music.

The orchestra, in general, has a difficult task. The Philharmonic Orchestra of the Cottbus State Theatre, under the direction of Johannes Zurl, brings out some of the score's beauties, including wonderful, impressionistic blends. But in contrast to the director, who emphasizes and often adds to the harshness, Zurl avoids orchestral exaggerations. Even the love between the vixen and the fox sounds quite understated.

The sound is also influenced by the fact that the sung in Cottbus is in German. This is a problem, because Janáček found his linguistic melodies by listening carefully to Czech and is thus able to convey the most subtle emotional twists. Furthermore, one hears the old translation by Max Brod, which alters the content, and not for the better. Brod's version makes the human world seem more shallow than it is in the original.

And is the contrast between rigid human order here and free animal life there even true? The young vixen, seeking to free herself from the tumult, incites the hens at the forester's farm to revolt. But just before she escapes, in true vixen fashion, she bites the hens to death. In the second act, her lover delivers rabbit meat as a promotional gift. And the vixen's murderer is ultimately a vagrant and poacher—clearly an enemy of the dignitaries with whom the forester is getting drunk.

As always, the circumstances are contradictory: an anarchic revolt is not a revolution, violence also occurs between the oppressed—the work is politically more astute than its politically engaged interpreters. The question remains what to do with it today.

One extreme is Clara Weyde's Magdeburg production of 2024, where the forest is also broken from the start, and one can fully understand the forester's decision to shoot himself at the end. At the other end is Katharina Thalbach's version, which has been successful for many years at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, featuring many imaginatively designed forest animals and running the risk of audiences simply enjoying the pretty. But even the positive aspects may have become suspect: without them, it doesn't work, especially in this work. Otherwise, the emotional nuances with which Janáček musically endowed the people would find no stage equivalent. And how can the impending and already far-reaching destruction of nature be made clear if one sees it as broken from the start? Doesn't Janáček's assertion of the eternity of nature – however questionable it may seem – also include an image of a possible future that is politically necessary?

In Cottbus, this final apotheosis belongs to the orchestra, which finds a powerful approach here and is not further disrupted by the direction. The performance is also carried by Anna Martha Schuitemaker as the vixen, who embodies the possibility of a better life amidst malice and decline. Accordingly, the direction gives her more freedom, and Schuitemaker uses this to highlight the multifaceted nuances of this character. She is supported by the ensemble members of the Cottbus State Theater, who are able to cast the numerous smaller and medium-sized roles well.

Next performance: July 11, revival in the coming season www.staatstheater-cottbus.de