The Cunning Little Vixen by Janáček, Alates (2024/2025), Juhatatud Katharina Thalbach,, Dirigent Marko Letonja, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Berlin, Germany

„I am creating the Little Fox the way the Devil catches flies – when he has nothing better to do. I wrote the Little Fox for the forest and for the sorrow of my later years.” Leos Janacek wrote. But his opera THE CUNNING LITTLE VIXEN is certainly not the melancholic retrospective of an old man who feels himself closer to death than to life. Although the composer was in his late sixties, he created a work full of comic and poetic moments. Offsetting the „sorrow of his later years” we are given a merry and melancholic fable embracing both death and the comforting knowledge that death leads on to new life. The story is taken from a serialised novel by Rudolf Tesnohlídek illustrated by Stanislav Lolek and published in the Brno daily „Lidové noviny” from 1920 onwards. The composer wrote the libretto himself and the opera was completed by January 1924. It resembles an impressionistic composition of short, subtly instrumentalised scenes and episodes that are linked by a total of nine orchestral preludes and scene changes that provide the musical and dramaturgical structure of the work. Despite his affinity for impressionism and the music of Debussy, whom he admired, Janacek's musical language remains unique. He was one of very few composers who could develop music from the melody of language. Sequences resembling leitmotifs but lacking a stringent structural urgency can be detected throughout the opera. Characteristic of this opera are also the popular, albeit never folkloric, elements within the music and its decidedly rhythmic structure, which gives an added dimension to already beguiling melodies. „Katharina Thalbach's production teems with ideas as the undergrowth teems with animal life. At times we're at a loss where to look first, and afterwards the temptation is to tell everyone about the snail or the grumpy badger with his pipe, but we don't, because we don't want to spoil the delight for others. Added to this there is Ezio Toffolutti's stage set, which recalls the woodland scenery or moonlit night of a lovingly illustrated children's book. ” (Berliner Zeitung)