Leos Janácek (Composer) 1854–1928. The son of a poor schoolmaster, Janácek studied at the Prague Organ School. In 1875 he was appointed conductor of the Brno Philharmonic Society. He held this position for a few years, then feeling his musical education was still lacking, he went to the Leipzig Conservatory. After that, he spent a year in Vienna furthering his studies. Finally in 1881, he returned to Brno and founded his own organ school, an institution he directed until it became the State Conservatory of Music in 1920. Janácek’s first significant composition was written when he was forty, and his most famous works were produced after his sixtieth birthday.

Though he composed chamber and orchestral works, piano music, a song cycle, ballet music, and a mass, he is known primarily for his operas. Jenufa (1904), his third opera, had its premiere in Brno, but it was not until the 1916 production in Prague that Janácek suddenly became famous. Kát’a Kabanová (1921) is often regarded as a pivotal work, having one foot in the post-romantic school and one in modernism. His next opera, The Cunning Little Vixen, turns to nature for its subject. In Janácek’s last two operas, the composer’s melodic language becomes more terse, rugged, and dissonant, though never atonal. The Makropoulos Case, written in 1926, turns from nature to an urban world of legal complexities and theatrical life. From the House of the Dead is a setting of Dostoyevsky’s prison diaries and the composer’s last work. Janácek caught a chill while taking a walk that rapidly worsened, turning into the pneumonia from which he died at age 72 in Ostrava.

Janácek’s music relies heavily on the speech patterns of the Czechoslovakian language. He studied the melody and rhythm of speech for over thirty years, systematically notating his discoveries. He used his research to devise various motifs – short phrases of a distinct rhythmic and melodic content – that form the basis of expression in his music. Though he uses many folk-like materials in his work, his other compositional traits are more easily recognized. These include the declamatory patterns of his vocal music; a certain dry humor; tight, pared-down harmony; intense rhythmic drive; and spare but skillful orchestration. These characteristics are also identifiable in his “Glagolitic Mass” (1926), his symphonic poem “Taras Bulba” (1928), his two string quartets, and many of his chamber works. Janácek was a musical anomaly – his work is of such originality and inventiveness that he has no musical predecessors or ancestors. While some of his operas, most notably Jenufa and Kát’a Kabanová, have always been performed, today’s audiences are able to enjoy a wider range of this uniquely satisfying and profoundly moving music. 

— NY City Opera

The Cunning Little Vixen is known in Czech as Příhody lišky Bystroušky, which more accurately translates as Adventures of the Vixen Sharp-Ears. Indeed, Janáček’s opera reads as a series of scenes from the Vixen’s life, along with snapshots of humans affected by her. Janáček did, however, fashion these series of vignettes into a coherent whole and significantly altered Rudolf Těsnohlídek’s original serialized novella (with drawings by Stanislav Lolek) into a work with a profound ending. The Cunning Little Vixen vies with Jenůfa as being Janáček’s most frequently performed opera. What is it about this work—often described as quirky, magical, beautiful, touching, moving, and life-affirming—that captures our hearts?

In The Cunning Little Vixen, Janáček’s messages of the transformative power of love, the renewal of nature and of all life, and of coming to terms with disappointments, missed opportunities, and one’s mortality are all universal messages that are a part of being human. Yet, the story is told in an astoundingly unique way.

First, Janáček’s musical style is utterly unique. For years, the composer observed his native Moravian world and tried to capture in musical notation the utterances of people in all kinds of situations—from a woman calling her chickens to the dying words of his beloved daughter Olga. He was seeking to capture in music not only the natural inflection of Czech, but the emotions behind the words at those particular moments, and certainly in the case of his daughter, to express and preserve some of the essence of the person who spoke those words.

Most of the characters in the opera, both animals and humans, speak Moravian dialect from an area in and around Brno around the turn of the twentieth century. Interestingly, however, the Dog speaks more “proper,” standard Czech—perhaps because he has dedicated himself to art? The Schoolmaster, too, speaks more formal Czech, even when talking to himself. The poacher Harašta speaks with the most dialect—more on him later. The Fox speaks with respectful, gentlemanly Czech as he courts the Vixen.

Janáček was also one of the first opera composers to use prose text, rather than verse. This emphasis on natural expression means that much of his opera is in “real time,” rather than in stretched-out “musical time.” Because of this, and the physicality of much of the opera, it takes on a modern, cinematic quality. Certain expressive words, too, make their way into the orchestra as short, repetitive rhythmic fragments that weave in and out like a colorful tapestry or mosaic, typical of Janáček’s style.

Equally as important for the composer was the folk music of his native Moravia, with its modal scales, often irregular phrase lengths, mixed meters, and infectious rhythms. Although Janáček does not quote folk music in this opera, he does quote some folk texts, and he creates his own wonderful folk-like music to go with them. Essential qualities of Moravian folk music, too, are subtly infused throughout the work in various harmonies and melodic patterns.

Finally, Janáček created a musical motif made up of three notes to represent love: A-flat ascending to D-flat ascending a step to E-flat. This motif is not exclusive to this opera, either—it occurs in Janáček’s The Diary of One Who Vanished, Kát’a Kabanová, the Violin Sonata, and other works. However, it occurs the most in The Cunning Little Vixen. It is heard most prominently throughout the Vixen and Fox love duet, in the otherworldly off-stage chorus that opens their scene, and also in the orchestra at the very end of the opera.

Along with a musical style rooted in the Moravian countryside, The Cunning Little Vixen takes place in Moravia, and features animals, insects, and even mushrooms from Moravia. Humans are the Forester, Schoolmaster, and Parson—the upper crust of the village—along with the Forester’s Wife, an Innkeeper, and the Innkeeper’s Wife, as well as the poultry-dealer and poacher Harašta, and the boys Frantík and Pepík.

From the opening notes of the opera we are immediately drawn into Janáček’s sound-world, with its fascinating rhythms, colors, harmonies, and melodies depicting nature’s animals, insects, and the forest. And so begins a unique theatrical work, filled with dance, song, musical speaking, gorgeous lyricism and orchestral interludes, and both animals and people, often interacting, all trying to find their way in the world.

Into this unique world come universal truths. The forest has long been filled with symbolisms, and indeed, the forest here is where the Vixen finds freedom and love; the Schoolmaster and Parson reveal and confront their past; and the Forester, a guardian of the forest itself, has a profound revelation. Through love, the Vixen is transformed from a wild, fiercely independent creature. Through nature, the Forester is transformed from a crass, guardedly rough person into a comtemplative poet as he sees the beauty of the circle of life, and his place in that circle. The love motif shines through after his revelation, his farewell.

Along the way, we see a natural world of animals who—like humans—sometimes quarrel and sometimes struggle to survive, but who are fully themselves. This contrasts with the more complicated world of people, who often try to control nature and themselves, guarding their secrets and inner turmoil until love, compassion, and understanding—or nature—help them find a way.

Janáček himself commented that the poacher Harašta and the Vixen share a lot in common. They both depend on poultry for their survival, he noted, and in Harašta the Vixen finally meets her match. Perhaps this is because Harašta is more in tune with nature than the other humans. He has learned to be cunning. His heavy use of dialect reveals that he is unencumbered by human education and what is “proper.” Somehow, he has even been able to woo and marry the unattainable, even unseen, Terynka, who broke the hearts of others in the inn.

Yes, all wonderfully quirky, magical, beautiful, touching, moving, and life-affirming! For me, my encounters with this opera have always touched something personal—from my first encounter with The Cunning Little Vixen as an opera coach apprentice in Prague in the 1990s, when I met my future wife, who was a dragonfly; to U-M’s first production in 2002, as we awaited the birth of our son six months later; and other wonderful productions scattered here and there, although not all coinciding with such life-changing events! With this new, wonderful production, as I look down the road I begin to relate more with the aging Forester and the beauty of life’s renewal. . . May you ALL find beauty, delight, magic, and enrichment in Janáček’s Adventures of the Vixen Sharp-Ears!

–Timothy Cheek

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The University of Michigan is located on the territory of the Anishinaabe people. In 1817, the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Bodewadami Nations made the largest single land transfer to the University of Michigan, ceded in the Treaty of Fort Meigs, so that their children could be educated. We acknowledge the history of native displacement that allowed the University of Michigan to be founded. Today we reaffirm contemporary and ancestral Anishinaabek ties to the land and their profound contributions to this institution.