The Cunning Little Vixen
Director's Notes

I can’t think of many more charming pieces to work on than The Cunning Little Vixen. Overall a comedy, it is based on a cartoon series from a local Czechoslovakian newspaper that the composer, Leoš Janáček, read avidly; think of it as a 1924 version of a graphic novel. Janáček loved the series so much that he decided to immortalize it in his opera.

 

The other over-riding factor in choosing to write the opera is his boundless passion for all things natural. In this, he is not alone. The Czech people have always been naturists, fiercely proud of their beautiful, unspoiled, hard won country. The other inspiration for Janáček writing a piece about a young, female fox and following her through several years of her brief existence, is that he had fallen in love with a young woman who was 40 years his junior. Though the relationship was always platonic, she was his muse for the last few years of his life and made him immeasurably happy. That happiness is wonderfully present in this opera. 

 

We chose this piece for the large amount of fun, fulfilling, and challenging roles it offers our young artists. The music is complex and often difficult. Janáček was striving for a spoken feeling, youthful and real as opposed to the highfaluting discussions of gods and goddesses so prevalent in operas of this era. Our two main characters are a Gamekeeper who maintains a small farm, a prominent figure to this day in rural Europe. He tries to bend nature to his will and finally has a life-changing epiphany. We also have the Vixen, captured when she was a malleable toddler, who carries what she learns about and from the human world during her captivity into the dark, magical Slovak forest. She uses her knowledge to educate her fellow woodland denizens, going from a brief socialist period into motherhood (including several litters). Her frustration with the callousness and selfishness of humans gets the best of her, though, and ultimately brings about her demise.

 

Beautiful, funny, heartbreaking and inspiring, this is an opera for any period. Look around you at the magnificent California vistas, be they mountainous, oceanic, desert, or forest, and become more aware of their existence and importance in our lives, both from practical and aesthetic perspectives. Our natural world is vital and we must not take any aspect of it for granted. We must at all costs cherish and preserve it and fight to protect it for our children and children’s’ children.

 

—Ken Cazan, Nov. 2025