No opera is more enigmatic than Leoš Janáček’s “Little Vixen Schlaukopf” – known in German as “The Cunning Little Vixen” – an erotic fantasy composed shortly after the First World War, which appears childlike and uninhibitedly mixes animal and human worlds, nature and Celebrating life with sharpened sounds and stoically accepting death. What is not all indicated here, what could not be meant here! Directors are in trouble with this piece that torpedoes all genre boundaries and all certainties. In the Munich National Theater, director Barrie Kosky has now opted for reduction and openness in a new production. In front of and in mostly tinsel curtains, he shows a troupe of young people running wild in the forest, the fabulous children’s choir of the house and many extras are lively. They are frogs and badgers and gnats and crickets and woodpeckers and owls, but mostly pubescent children.
Barrie Kosky is a game maker in love with cabaret and musicals, but by no means harmless. Because he doesn’t show the vixen and the other forest animals as animals at all, and because he suppresses all animal disguise and animal movement patterns, an aspect of this exceptional opera that is often suppressed becomes impossible to overlook and unmistakable. Because in just 100 minutes, a huge panorama of love concepts is presented here.
Kosky refuses the explicit, he leaves everything to the music
Most human men are unhappy in love, all of them drunkards: priests, teachers, foresters. The latter, the glorious Wolfgang Koch, portrays him as an apparently resigned older gentleman who catches a young vixen in the frustration of love. This is a common erotic motif in many cultures, Christine Wunnicke described it in her wonderful novel “The Fox and Dr. Shimamura”. But Kosky refuses anything explicit, he leaves the nature and animal associations to the music, which is unmistakable on this point.
On this evening, the director shows himself to be a master of allusion, who leaves it to the imagination of his audience to explore the deeper layers of meaning in this opera, which is only laden with meaning. Kosky’s Förster is therefore a smiling erotic abyss. And the audience celebrates this light and playful performance long and hard.
But Kosky knows no stopping the hens grouped around their rooster, they are allowed to show themselves as gogo girls, giggling uncontrollably with their brightly shimmering yolk feathers, who are massacred one after the other by the greedy, freedom-loving, and cheeky vixen. Feathers, legs, blood and heads whirl across the stage, a half-hatched chick dances its desperation in its damaged shell. enthusiasm in the audience.
This vixen takes what she wants, it’s a woman’s emancipation
Elena Tsallagova as the fox celebrates the emancipation of a woman that was already applied to Janáček, she takes what and who she needs, she plays shamelessly with human men and then falls madly in love with the sex appeal of the fox, which Angela Brower so unmacholy amazed at so much Fox power sings. Tsallagova and Brower are wonderfully un-operatic in love with each other and sex, frolic around and can still produce very big opera tones when this score, which produces spring awakening, blossoming and sounds of nature, occasionally requires it.
The forester (Wolfgang Koch) chases a vixen out of love frustration.
(Photo: Wilfried Hösl)
Which brings us to the Conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla must come, who is currently head of the symphonic orchestra in Birmingham, with whom Simon Rattle and Andris Nelsons have already established their world careers. Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla can rest. Even in the most agitated moments of this opera, which towards the end is increasingly suffused with the sound of death, she never exhausts herself completely, always finding herself in the pauses in which she never loses the relaxed tension of the evening. The unsentimental aspect of Janáček’s sounds suits her, the salon distant, in which even the death of the vixen can be experienced as natural and natural, only with a few harsher dissonances more than usual.
But death is, Janáček preaches the cyclical cycle of the world, here just a variety of the creaturely. Like Olivier Messiaen, who is aesthetically close to him, Janáček also offers a constantly bubbling celebration of nature, his music constantly produces joy, light and vitality. The conductor creates all of this with clear, economical gestures and delivers even more: a tone of world grief borrowed from Gustav Mahler, which surrounds the death of the vixen and transforms the music into a great lament adagio. This exaggerates the score and corrects Janáček, who opposes the excessive self-cult of the Romantic period. Where the composer sees the species fox, the conductor experiences the vixen as an individual. But this singular score can withstand that too.