Das schlaue Füchslein - Schedule, Program & Tickets

Das schlaue Füchslein

Opera in three acts
Libretto by Leos Janacek after the novella by Rudolf Tesnohlídek
German text version by Peter Brenner using the text version by Max Brod
First performance on November 6, 1924 in Brno
Premiere at the Deutsche Oper Berlin on June 30, 2000

Suitable for children over 10 years

In German with German and English surtitles

1 hour 45 minutes / No break

It tells episodes from the life of the young vixen Cleverhead. The forester, whom the longing for freedom and love has never left, one day captures her in the forest and takes her home, for she appears to him as an embodiment of this longing. But she manages to escape. In the forest she drives the badger out of his cave and settles down there himself. Here she also finds her great love: A gallant fox advertises her, in their cave, the two spend their first night of love. Finally, they celebrate a wedding among the animals of the forest. Soon we will see the vixen as a proud mother in the circle of her numerous boys. But luck is short-lived: Vixen Clever dies, hit by a bullet from the poacher Harasta. Meanwhile, the forester and the schoolmaster sit together in the bar and complain about the approaching age. For the forester, the death of the vixen is particularly bitter. He can not forget their unbridled nature, their desire for freedom and their youth. He is greeted by a strange, magical mood in the woods, and he nods. Then, like a vision, a young little vixen appears to his mother, cut out of his face. Life triumphs over transience. It closes a circle.

"I'm doing the vixen as if the devil were catching flies-if he's up to something better. I wrote the little vixen for the forest and for the sadness of my late years, "wrote Leos Janacek once. But his opera THE TORTURE FUCHSLEIN is not the melancholy life review of an old man to whom death is closer than life. Although the composer was already approaching seventy, he created a work full of humor and poetry. He opposed the "mourning of his later years" with a cheerful and melancholy animal fairy tale, which excludes death just as little as the comforting certainty that in nature new life is constantly being created from the offense. The material is based on a continuation novel by Rudolf Tesnohlídek, illustrated with drawings by the painter Stanislav Lolek, which appeared in the Brno daily "Lidové noviny" from 1920 onwards. The composer wrote the libretto himself, the whole opera was finally in January 1924 before. It was composed as an impressionistic soundscape of subtly orchestrated short scenes and episodes, connected by a total of nine orchestral preludes and transformations, which structure the work musically and dramaturgically. However, close to Impressionism and the music of his great role model Debussy, Janacek's tone language remains unmistakable: like no other, he was able to develop music from speech melodies. Guideline-like sequences can be followed throughout the entire plant without strict implementation. Also characteristic are the folk songs, never folkloristic acting elements of the music as well as their pronounced rhythmic structure, through which even the bewitching melody receives its unmistakable character.

"Katharina Thalbach's production is teeming with ideas like a forest floor in front of animals. Sometimes one hardly knows where to look first, and afterwards one wants to tell everyone about the snail or the grumpy badger with his pipe, but then lets it stay in order not to astonish the other. In addition, Ezio Toffolutti's stage sets conjure up the forest weaving or the full moon night, as if they had been taken from a lovingly illustrated children's book. "(Berliner Zeitung)

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