The Cunning Little Vixen (review)

There are few more inviting introductions to twentieth century opera than Leos Janácek’s animal opera, The Cunning Little Vixen, which lays claim to serious discussions of human loneliness, sexual awakening, and ecology, as well as a joyful score, among its considerable and immediate charms. Consistent with its policy of presenting all operas in English (usually with relaxed tempos and restrained orchestral playing, in order to increase audience comprehension), the English National Opera’s production used Norman Tucker’s briskly contemporary translation of Janácek’s own Czech libretto. One suspects that such phrases as “I’m a feminist” and “bloody hell!” are closer to the spirit than the actual letter of Janácek’s—>Janácek’s text, which was

Figure 1.

The English National Opera’s Revival of Leos Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen, with Sara Fulgoni as the fox and Lesley Garrett as the vixen. Photo: Clive Barda

based on local newspaper animal cartoons and a subsequent series of newspaper columns.

Maria Bjornson’s charming set consisted of a grassy hillock which allowed the animal characters to keep in constant motion, alternately tumbling and prancing and emerging from foxholes with trapdoors; to frame the earthly events, a set of grandmotherly birds sat knitting in rocking chairs suspended in trees. The hillock occasionally opened to reveal a playing space which served variously as a doghouse, chicken coop, and village pub for the forlorn human characters. The insect characters like the Dragonfly and Mosquito carried images of themselves on poles, while the human characters seemed vaguely Edwardian and definitely frustrated.

David Pountney’s direction encouraged constant movement and animal-like energy among all the characters, and Stuart Hopps’s choreography took advantage of all the orchestral passages to keep animals flitting about the stage. As this is an opera about the cycle of life—maturation, curiosity, sexual awareness and fulfillment, death and regeneration—it is also one of the most infectiously optimistic of operas; Spinoza would have loved its clearly pantheistic message of the indissolvable intermingling of God, nature, and mankind in a seamless web of being.

The title role is a dream for England’s operatic pop diva of the moment, Lesley Garrett, who was transformed from a curious young vixen who is caught by the Forester and subjected to various humiliations at the hands of people, to a sexually awakening animal (in something like a flapper dress) and mature woman—who dies cruelly at the peak of her fulfillment. Garrett was an ideal choice for the flirtatious, curious, and fatally adventurous aspects of the Vixen—always in motion and irresistibly optimistic. Sara Fulgoni undertook the pants role of the Fox who introduces the Vixen to mature sexual love, and their marriage is the occasion for a rapturous celebration among the animals at the end of the second act. The Forester, who initially captures the Vixen but who learns to surrender to the mystery of natural renewal at the opera’s climax, was sonorously sung by Nicholas Folwell.

Among the lesser characters, John Graham-Hall (dressed like a proper Edwardian gentleman, down to plus-fours and bicycle clips), elegantly typified the alienation and loneliness of the human characters, who so painfully lack the spontaneity of the animals; Rachel Lopez beautifully danced the Spirit of the Vixen whom the chained-up Vixen watches forlornly from the doghouse. Chief among the scene-stealers were the Cock, doing a music-hall turn, and the Hens, dressed as refugee charladies from Monty Python, puffing on broken cigarettes while they wearily turned out their supply of eggs.

Stephen Barlow’s conducting was happily indulgent of the singers, in the best tradition of ENO, which traditionally favors the audibility of the text over purely musical considerations, although there were still plenty of opportunities for orchestral richness, as in the gorgeous hunting-horn passage in the last act. The English have found a vein of pure gold in Janácek’s operas that Americans never have...