Das schlaue Füchslein

Libretto by Leoš Janáček
based on the novella by Rudolf Těsnohlídek
German translation by Hans Hartleb

Theater am Domhof
Premiere May 1, 2027

“My motifs spring from the earth, from animals, from people—they are connected to everything that exists.”

writes nature lover Leoš Janáček after suffering several personal tragedies.
 

By then 70 years old, Leoš Janáček had learned to accept death as a natural part of life. Inspired by Rudolf Těsnohlidek’s well-known picture story of the time, Janáček found confirmation for his most popular opera, *The Cunning Little Vixen*, in the eternal cycle of becoming and passing away, dying and being born, in the early 1920s.  It tells the story of a young vixen who is captured and imprisoned by the forester, incites the chickens on his farm to revolt, before biting through the rooster’s throat and fleeing back into the forest.

There she meets a young fox, with whom she brings an innumerable number of offspring into the world, and is ultimately shot by a poacher.

Janáček incorporated what he heard and perceived in the forest into the music of his fable opera, finding highly evocative sounds to express the human in the animal and the animal in the human.