The Cunning Little Vixen

Oper Frankfurt, Opera House, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Scene 6 from the opera "The Cunning Little Vixen", photo 2

Scene 1 from the opera "The Cunning Little Vixen", photo 6

Scene 2 from the opera "The Cunning Little Vixen", photo 7

Scene 3 from the opera "The Cunning Little Vixen", photo 8

Scene 4 from the opera "The Cunning Little Vixen", photo 9

Scene 5 from the opera "The Cunning Little Vixen", photo 10

All photos (10)

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6 PM

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Important Info

Type: Opera

City: Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Starts at: 18:00

Acts: 3

Intervals: 1

Duration: 2h

Sung in: Czech

Titles in: English,German

Ticket delivery: E-Tickets

E-tickets: Print at home or at the box office of the event if so specified. You will find more information in your booking confirmation email.

Can I choose my seats?

Overview

Director Ute M. Engelhardt brought the animal and human worlds even closer together in her Götz Friedrich Prize winning production while still managing to make the fantastic moments in the work, the characters’ longings, nightmares, dreams and fears come alive.

An energetic adolescent fox cub and a forester come into contact in Leoš Janáček’s impressionistic, beautiful opera. Lively and sensitive, poetic and speckled with irony it tells the eternal cycle of life and death. In so doing the composer manages to capture the tone of his beloved Slavic dance and folkmusic and imitate human and animal voices in a natural way. When he was nearly 70 years old Janáček was inspired to write this opera by a comic strip in a Brno daily paper (April - June 1920), which told the story of his animal heroine.

History

Premiere of this production: 06 November 1924, National Theatre Brno

The Cunning Little Vixen (Czech: Příhody lišky Bystroušky; alternative English title: Tales of Vixen Sharp-Ears) is a Czech-language opera by Leoš Janáček, composed in 1921 to 1923. Its libretto was adapted by the composer from a 1920 serialized novella, Liška Bystrouška, by Rudolf Těsnohlídek, which was first published in the newspaper Lidové noviny (with illustrations by Stanislav Lolek).

Synopsis

Act 1
In the forest, the animals and insects are playing and dancing. The Forester enters and lies down against a tree for a nap. A curious Vixen Cub (usually sung by a young girl), inquisitively chases a frog right into the lap of the surprised forester who forcibly takes the vixen home as a pet. Time passes (in the form of an orchestral interlude) and we see the Vixen, now grown up into a young adult (and sung by a soprano), 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 Cock and Chocholka the hen, kills the other chickens, jumps over the fence and runs off to freedom.

Act 2
The vixen takes over a badger's home and kicks him out. In the inn, the pastor, the forester, and the schoolmaster drink and talk about their mutual infatuation with the gypsy girl Terynka. The drunken schoolmaster leaves the inn and mistakes a sunflower behind which the vixen is hiding 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 necessitates 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 fox and 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 1. This reassurance of the cycle of death leading to new life gives his heart a deep peace.

Venue Info

Oper Frankfurt - Frankfurt am Main
Untermainanlage 11

The Oper Frankfurt (Frankfurt Opera) is one of the leading opera companies in Europe, and voted best "Opera house of the year" several times since 1996.

Opera in Frankfurt am Main has a long tradition, with many world premieres such as Franz Schreker's Der ferne Klang in 1912, Fennimore und Gerda by Frederick Delius in 1919, and Carl Orff's Carmina Burana in 1937. Frankfurt's international recognition began in the Gielen Era, 1977 to 1987, when Michael Gielen and stage directors such as Ruth Berghaus collaborated.

A historic opera house from 1880 was destroyed in World War II, and reconstructed as a concert hall, Alte Oper. The present opera house, built in 1963, is under one roof with the stage for drama. The opera orchestra is called Frankfurter Opern- und Museumsorchester. Today's venue for Baroque and contemporary opera is the Bockenheimer Depot, a former tram depot.

Oper Frankfurt is part of the Städtische Bühnen Frankfurt.

Frankfurt's first opera was Johann Theile's Adam und Eva, performed in 1698 by Johann Velten's touring company. The young Goethe's first operas in his home town of Frankfurt were productions by Theobald Marchand's company.

1782 – 1880
Opened in 1782, the Comoedienhaus was the first permanent venue of the Frankfurt Theater (drama and opera). In 1878 German violinist Willy Hess took up the leadership of the Oper Frankfurt. He resigned from that post in 1886 to take up a professorship in the Rotterdam Conservatorium voor Muziek.

1880 – 1944
The first representative opera house of the city was inaugurated in Frankfurt in 1880 at Opernplatz. Under the direction of the first Intendant Emil Claar and the first Kapellmeister Felix Otto Dessoff, the house was opened with Mozart's opera Don Giovanni.

During the 1920s, the opera in Frankfurt had more prominent Jewish singers than any other company in Germany, including the tenor Hermann Schramm, bass Hans Erl (the first King in Schreker's Der Schatzgräber), baritone Richard Breitenfeld and contralto Magda Spiegel, who also toured with Frankfurt Opera performing Wagner in the Netherlands. These singers were forced to leave the opera in June 1933. Orff's Carmina Burana was premiered at Oper Frankfurt in 1937. Jewish members of the opera company among those rounded up at 9 November 1938 at the Festhalle Frankfurt, where Erl sang In diesen Heilgen Hallen, from the Magic Flute for the deportees. Members of Frankfurt Opera were sent to Auschwitz and other camps where they perished.

1945 – 1970s
The opera house was damaged in an air raid in January 1944, and then almost completely destroyed in March. A new house for opera and play was built, completed in 1963 at the Theaterplatz (now Willy-Brandt-Platz). In 1952, Georg Solti became Generalmusikdirektor (GMD) and Intendant of the Oper Frankfurt, where he remained in charge for nine years.

The Gielen Era
From 1977 to 1987, Frankfurt Opera was led by Michael Gielen. This decade became known as the "Gielen Era", notable for the music of a conductor who was also a composer, and directors including Ruth Berghaus and Hans Neuenfels, whose productions of standard works such as Verdi's Aida and Wagner's Ring Cycle were thought-provoking. Operas which received their world premieres at the house were also performed again, including Franz Schreker's Die Gezeichneten.

1987 – present
The stage of the opera house was destroyed by a fire in November 1987. The opera house was rebuilt and opened in April 1991. Many famous singers started their career with the company, including Franz Völker, Edda Moser, Cheryl Studer and Diana Damrau, and many established artists have been engaged there in recent seasons including Christian Gerhaher, whose roles here have included Monteverdi's L'Orfeo and his first Wolfram in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Piotr Beczała in Massenet's Werther and Jan-Hendrik Rootering in Wagner's Parsifal.

Since 2002, Bernd Loebe has served as Intendant of the company. The company's current GMD is Sebastian Weigle, since 2008. Weigle has made commercial recordings of opera with the company for the OEHMS Classics label. He is scheduled to stand down as GMD of Oper Frankfurt at the close of the 2022–2023 season. In October 2021, the company announced the appointment of Thomas Guggeis as the next GMD of the company, effective with the 2023–2024 season, with an initial contract of 5 years.

Oper Frankfurt was voted 1996, 2003, 2015, 2018 and 2020 "Opera House of the Year" by the magazine Opernwelt.