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Leoš Janáček (1854–1928)

arr. Václav Talich (1883–1961) after František Škvor (1898–1970)

The Cunning Little Vixen – suite (1921–3, arr. 1937)

1. Andante

2. Andante

Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen is probably the only opera (and certainly the first) to have been based on a strip cartoon from a daily newspaper. Marie Stejskalová, Janáček’s maid for 40-odd years, told how it was her laughing out loud at a particularly funny drawing of the Vixen cuddling up to her lover, the Fox, that first drew the 66-year-old composer’s attention to the anthropomorphic animal adventure serial that Rudolf Těsnohlídek was writing for the Brno daily, Lidové noviny (‘People’s News’), to accompany a series of drawings by the painter Stanislav Lolek. Janáček immediately set about turning the Vixen into the heroine of his next opera, seeing in her freedom-loving sensuality yet another aspect of Kamila Stösslová, the younger married woman with whom he had long been obsessed and whose portrait he had already sketched in Katya Kabanova and was to complete in The Makropulos Case.

The Cunning Little Vixen was first produced in Brno on 6 November 1924; the Prague premiere took place the following May. Several new Czech productions were mounted in the mid-1930s, the most successful of which opened at the Prague National Theatre in May 1937 under Václav Talich. Talich had already given some notable accounts of Janáček’s orchestral works during the composer’s lifetime. (On 9 November 1924 he had conducted the Prague premiere of Taras Bulba and had repeated it on 8 December, an occasion when both the composer and the Czech President Masaryk were in the audience.) For the 1937 staging of Vixen, Talich asked František Škvor and Jaroslav Ŕídký to reorchestrate the entire opera: Škvor was responsible for Act 1, Ŕídký for the remainder. Interventionist as it may appear, Talich commissioned the reorchestration for entirely benevolent reasons: he wanted to ease the hair-raising technical demands of the original scoring, and to underline the music’s sensuality. It is an affectionate tribute to a composer for whom he had the greatest admiration.

Derived entirely from Act 1 (which itself runs for under half an hour), Talich’s suite is a seamlessly crafted transcription of the extended orchestral music that constitutes much of the act, together with all of its closing scene. The first movement (corresponding to the scene entitled ‘How Bystrouška [Vixen] was Caught’) is a magical evocation of a sunny afternoon in the forest. Much of this opening scene is purely orchestral in the opera: an idyllic – and, on stage, an almost entirely balletic – depiction of animal life. Flies circle, a blue dragonfly hovers, a badger emerges from his sett. A cricket and a grasshopper dance a duet. A frog tries to catch a mosquito and lands instead on the nose of the sleeping Gamekeeper, who wakes, sees the Vixen and carries her off. The blue dragonfly folds its wings in the sunshine. Differences in orchestration are immediately apparent: in the first bars of the suite, Janáček’s woodwind parts are omitted, and for the chattering little motif that follows, Škvor gives to a flute and clarinet what Janáček scored for oboe and violins col legno (played with the wood of the bow).

The second movement begins with the orchestral introduction to the opera’s second scene, set in the farmyard of the Gamekeeper’s lodge, where the captured Vixen is tied up. Talich includes all of Janáček’s music up to the first entry of the voices, a tone-painting of an autumn afternoon in the sunshine. The action that follows is cut: the musings of Lapák (an endearingly morose, if amorous, dog), the Vixen’s racy tale of love-life in the woods, and her tormenting by two farm boys (one of whom she bites in just revenge). The suite continues with the radiant interlude in which the Vixen dreams of her sexual awakening and transformation into a beautiful young woman. From this point, the suite follows the opera to the end of the act. In music of increasing animation, the Vixen tries (and fails) to rouse the Hens to militant feminist action, urging them to liberate themselves from slavish dependency on the Rooster, whom she brands a chauvinist thug. Disgusted by their complacency (and eager for a square meal), she fools the feeble-minded birds by pretending to be dead, then springs back to life and wrings their necks one by one. In the chaos that follows this free-range bloodbath, the Vixen escapes to the forest and freedom.

Programme note © Nigel Simeone

Nigel Simeone is a professor of music at the University of Sheffield. He has written widely on Janáček, and is also an authority on the music of Messiaen.

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