Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life exempt from public haunt
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in everything.
I would not change it.

As You Like It – William Shakespeare


Deciduous forests once covered Central and Western Europe; today the continent's only undisturbed forests lie in the far north, following the rapid population of the land, the severing of the plains with railway lines and roads and the creation of the urban centres through which the European dynasties thrived. Throughout the 19th and 20th century more of those rural areas were encroached upon by the industrialising cities and increasingly the human grip on the natural world tightened and Europe was changed. It is, then, not a surprise that the romantic imagination – itself a nostalgic predisposition – was littered with images of the forest, from Caspar David Friedrich, through Schubert’s wandering lovers in Die Schöne Müllerin and Winterreisse, through to Dvořák’s Rusalka and the heralding cowbells of Mahler’s symphonic landscape. Dvořák’s penultimate opera was the culmination of the Czech National Revival’s obsession with its own natural landscape, derived, as the title of Smetana’s tone poem suggests, ‘From Bohemia’s Woods and Fields’. This was the culture which bore Janáček, and whilst only very few of his works pay direct homage to that tradition – the late unfinished Danube Symphony for one – the sense of belonging to the land and the forest pervade Janáček’s seventh opera Příhody Lišky Bystroušky . Yet Janáček surprises us by undermining our expectations of the work and the world in which it exists.

In 1920 the popular Brno newspaper Lidové noviny serialised Vixen Bystrouška, a joyful if ludicrous tale by Rudolf Těsnohlídek (based on pictures by Stanislav Lolek). According to the Janáčeks’ maid, Marie Stejskalová, it was she who introduced the cartoons and story to Janáček. She kept the cuttings from the newspaper, giving them to the composer; later Těsnohlídek’s novelisation became the basis for the libretto. The fact that the composer found his inspiration in the cartoons for his next opera was always cause for surprise to Těsnohlídek, who wrote that people liked the stories of Sharp-ears so much ‘because she moved close to the ground’. His suggestion of her as an unsophisticated being certainly show how he was unaware that Janáček would tease such a refined work out of the simple newspaper story.

Whilst many have argued that Vixen is an experimental work: with children on stage, its preponderance of dance, its use of a cartoon as the inspiration for an opera; it is also beholden to operatic heritage. It follows the post-Wagnerian Märchenoper (‘fairy-tale-opera’) tradition as made paradigmatic in Humperdinck’s operas Hänsel und Gretel and Königskinder (themselves obsessed with animals and the forest). Equally its use of a travesti role (the Fox) to suggest a youthful or sexually virile personality shows a debt to tradition that is sometimes overlooked. In its quasi-anthropomorphic treatment of the animals Janáček looks back with Beatrix Potter and Kenneth Grahame’s cuddly creations to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. However, Janáček moves away from pure traditionalism by pioneering a fantastic musical language for the forest, based on his ‘notebook’ of animal sounds and bitter-sweet lyricism for the Vixen and the Fox (at its most heady in the lovers’ Sophie/Octavian-style duet and their Carmina Burana nuptials in Act Two). Whatever nods to tradition Vixen may possess, the work marked a sharp departure for the composer from the Slavic histrionics of his previous opera Káťa Kabanová. And whilst the composer wasn’t averse to the non-serious – his nationalistic mish-mash The Excursions of Mr Brouček is hardly opera seria – Janáček had shown a strong disposition for the disenfranchised lonely hearts of the Slavonic world.

Clearly the Vixen sparked something basic in the composer’s imagination. Since 1865 Janáček had been settled in the growing industrial city of Brno, yet his native home was in Hukvaldy, a gentle hilly countryside village in North-Eastern Moravia where our Forester, Schoolmaster and Priest could have resided. Eventually Janáček bought a cottage in the village of Hukvaldy, but prior to that he frequently visited Vincenc Sládek, who was the local forester. Janáček took full advantage of his friendship with him and went up into the hills around Hukvaldy to experience the animal world first-hand. Sládek’s nephew later remembered the incident:

Personal experience fed his note book with scribblings of bird calls, the rustling of trees and a mixed musical vocabulary for the world of Vixen Sharp-ears. These ‘clips’ don’t merely suggest at a sound-world, but like Messiaen’s copious annotations of bird song, pervaded Janáček’s language, unprecedented since his assimilation of the sounds of Moravian folk music into his writing for Jenůfa. But the snatches of forest sound, pithy and motivic as they are, aren’t scattered liberally through the music without design, rather they act as emotional signifiers and structural points in the drama, creating an emotionally cohesive idiom.

The greater achievement of Vixen, however, is that out of an original but merely entertaining piece of imaginary journalism, came a philosophically interesting work, relying on various tissues of text: the story, Janáček’s own interpretation of the images therein, his personal forest-going experiences and the large body of libretto he added to the work, forming the larger part of Act 3. And whilst the scope of the Lolek/Těsnohlídek Vixen story drives towards a comic ending, with the marriage of the Fox and Vixen and the ‘defeat’ of the humans’ endeavours to ensnare her, Janáček wasn’t content with the original form. Janáček changed the entire compass and direction of the Těsnohlídek narrative, as he had done with the Ostrovsky play which formed the basis of Káťa Kabanová, without ever resorting to the sentimental. The composer invented the Vixen’s death for his opera. The Vixen and the Fox discuss the potential for having more children in the spring; meanwhile Harašta is eagerly poaching in the forest. But whilst Janáček could have pictured Harašta belligerently seeking out Sharp-Ears (he the villain, she the heroine), it is she who provokes the poacher, scratching his nose and taunting him further. The natural response in the forest is to pull out your gun and shoot. Lamentation is brief and the sharp sounds of the gun complete the Vixen’s life and so Janáček modulates the story’s quality. He distorts its trajectory from comic frippery into tragi-comedy; the Forester’s realisation of the Vixen’s death and his acceptance of the renewal of the earth is the final non-sentimentalised moral. The piece, therefore, has an unforced didacticism, without ever turning down the route of sugar-coating the more tragic elements of the story.

The change in direction to the work caused some deliberation for Janáček and the composer was not entirely sure what to call his new work: an ‘opera’, a ‘fable’ or perhaps, most aptly, an ‘opera idyll’. Of all Janáček’s works, despite its ostensible transparency, Vixen is the most open to interpretation. Some directors have, for example, seen the work as the Forester’s own hallucinogenic dream, others as a tree-hugging manifesto, and the links between the world of the humans and that of the animals are accordingly emphasised or blurred. There is a balance in the piece between realism (the various animals on stage and the stories of how Janáček notated their real-life counterparts’ noises and calls) and symbolism (the dual casting of animals and humans, the Forester’s final numinous epiphany). It is not entirely clear whether Janáček wanted the worlds of the animals and humans linked. He encouraged the doubling of various parts, but this may have been partly a cost-effective decision for small or provincial theatres, such as in Janáček’s home-town of Brno, where the opera was premiered in November 1924. Janáček actively endorsed pairing roles and linking the many settings of Mr Brouček, yet he wrote after the first performance of The Vixen in Mainz in 1927 (the first performance of the opera outside Czechoslovakia) that ‘only a hint should surface of the sameness of our cycle and that of animal life. That is enough – it is true that for most this symbolism is too little’.

But whilst the human and animal worlds compete for credence and power, something lurks beneath the surface. As the famous Irish nursery-rhyme saccharinely but threateningly sings, “If you go down to the woods today, You're sure of a big surprise”. Even in the world of the Victorian nursery we are exposed to the danger of the forest. Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood skips through the woods towards Grandmother’s house almost too oblivious to the threat of the Wolf behind the next tree. And in Janáček’s mystical evocation of the life of the Moravian forest and our heroine Bystrouška (initially through her childish naivety) we are made aware of the menace in her domain. Our expectations of that world are immediately subverted in the overture. The opening mysterious tonality of A flat minor, the oscillating harmonies and quicksilvering dark and light of the orchestral textures don’t portray the jolly forest we were expecting. The voices off-stage and the strange modal and whole-tone writing pile in to create further disconcerting elements in Janáček’s forest. The Vixen herself is ‘other-worldy’, yet she is easily identifiable as a sassy seductress. The Schoolmaster imagines her to be the village girl Terynka, who assumes the most ‘other’ of all women in the Central European psyche, the Gypsy. And as such, for the biography-hunters amongst us, the Vixen and Terynka chime in with Janáček’s image of his hapless and unwitting ‘muse’ Kamila Stösslová as a Gypsy (as he called her in her incarnations in The Diary of One Who Disappeared and as Emilia Marty). The Vixen is not an extension of Janáček’s infatuation with the female characters of his operas, but a reversal of her predecessors. Káťa Kabanová may be the ultimate transgressor, the adulterer; however she is closer in form to Jenůfa than to our impish animal heroine. They are the dejected lovelorn females of Janáček’s world, where the Vixen is allowed to dominate the action and the other character’s imaginations entirely. Yet Janáček also allows his later more knowing females to illicit our sympathy, and the Vixen’s victory is that she manages to spurn the ‘real’ world, conquer the hearts of her fellow animals, and in turn the hearts of her audience.

All of these elements are part of Janáček’s elision of the audience’s sympathies with his various characters. The sexually-driven heterosexual male empathises with the Schoolmaster when gazing longingly toward Terynka/the Vixen. We feel the Vixen’s attraction towards the ‘matinée-idol’ fox and our prejudices towards the stereotypically ‘Gypsy’ acting of the Vixen are drummed up in the Forester’s wife’s tantrum in the farmyard. And whilst initially we side with the Vixen against the brutality of the human world, as time progresses, the Vixen dies and we are elided with the Forester’s own sympathies and awareness of his own mortality. As such, the major ‘other’ of the piece is death: both literal – the death of the chickens, the death of the Vixen – and metaphorical – the death of innocence. As the Forester could have piously said ‘in the midst of life we are in death’. In terms of the composer’s own life, The Cunning Little Vixen will forever be associated with his own death, as Janáček’s wife expressed when the final section of the opera was performed at his funeral in 1928.

Contrary to his final work, From the House of the Dead, which is so obsessed with the finality of life, Janáček never upsets the overall cheerfulness of Vixen and through the Forester’s acceptance of the renewal of life around him, made all the more jocular by the stuttering frog, the order of the world is reset and the glorious Puccini-like D flat major apotheosis (an extended ‘perfect’ cadence over the scope of the opera) confirms this for us. The Vixen, with whom we have ‘adventured’, may have died, but the public process in Janáček’s complex narrative is larger than that personal tragedy. Moreover, the opera affirmed his own understanding of the natural world in his native Lašsko – where Janáček himself died – as it disappeared under the industrial grip of the Central European powers.

Janáček was fully aware of how his own manipulation of Těsnohlídek’s original had changed the scope of the Adventures of the Vixen, as he explained to Max Brod, his loyal German translator, in 1923:

Janáček took a simplistic tale, replete with human parallels, and converted it into a pantheistic vision, not with the mawkish tone of Walt Disney’s humanised animal creations (which began to appear in America shortly after the opera’s premiere), but ‘with the gentle humour of St. Francis’, as described by Rosa Newmarch in her 1942 study The Music of Czechoslovakia. This humour is coupled with Janáček’s cyclical use of poignant musical fragments and motifs and, as Robin Holloway writes, ‘the animal comedy with its ecstatic cycle of endless renewal circumventing the vicious circle of ageing and death, [is a] manifest high peak of the century’s artistic endeavour, good deeds in wicked times, vindicating humane themes in an epoch of cynicism and mechanisation.’ As the cowbells in Mahler’s 6th symphony remind the listener of the beauty of the Tyrol, whilst the cataclysm of its first and last movements roll unrelentingly past our ears, so Janáček’s Vixen stands in the midst of contemporaneous works such as Wozzeck or the composer’s own From the House of the Dead as a warm testament to the dust from which we are created (the Moravian countryside, in the composer’s own life), and to which we must, alas, return. With Janáček’s Midas-touch the opera bursts out of the traditions from which it was born, mixing ‘other’ with ‘ordinary’, ‘animal’ with ‘human’, ‘life’ with ‘death’; it is a work like no other, confirming again the originality of Janáček’s additions to the world of 20th century music theatre. As the contemporary American poet Robert Frost wrote with customary ease, ‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference.’


This article was first published in The Cunning Little Vixen programme book (ed. Alain Perroux) for performances at le Grand Théâtre de Genève during November 2005. It was later published in this version for performances of The Cunning Little Vixen at De Nederlandse Opera in January 2006; the programme there was edited by Klaus Bertisch.