This Week: UT Opera Theatre Presents Janacek’s ‘The Cunning Little Vixen’

For its spring production, the University of Tennessee Opera Theatre will present  The Cunning Little Vixen, a three act opera by the Czech composer Leoš Janáček. UTOT will offer four performances with double casting, Friday thru Sunday, April 24–26, at the Bijou Theatre. The stage director is UTOT’s James Kenon Mitchell; the music director and conductor is Kevin Class. UTOT is a part of the Natalie L. Haslam College of Music.

Janáček completed the work in 1923, adapting the libretto from a novella by Rudolf Těsnohlídek. It received its first performance the next year in Brno (then located in the newly formed Czechoslovak Republic). The opera’s large and varied number of roles has made it popular in opera training programs as well as with prominent opera companies.

Transcending its fairytale facade, The Cunning Little Vixen tells the story of a young fox, captured by a forester who attempts to domesticate her. She escapes the cruelty of humans to return to the forest, a journey that underlines the themes of the natural cycle of life and death, a return to simplicity, freedom, and love.

Although The Cunning Little Vixen’s original language is Czech, UTOT will be performing it in English, using a translation by Norman Tucker. “We wanted to present the opera in a language accessible to the audience,” explains UTOT Director James Kenon Mitchell, “especially younger audiences who may struggle to read supertitles at the speed that they go by in an opera like this.  Having said that, we do have supertitles for the English text since the nature of operatic singing and the lush orchestration can still make it difficult to hear all of the words.”

Janáček’s evocative score is a masterful blend of folk tunes of his native Moravia with lush orchestral writing, capturing the playful, but often harsh, reality of the animal world.

“The score is full of folk-inspired music and even some actual Czech folk tunes,” offers Mitchell, ” All couched in an orchestration that is absolutely stuffed with color and gestures that mimic the sounds of the forest.  There are bird cries, insect calls, trees rustling and all manner of atmospheric writing for the instruments- it’s really like an extended symphonic poem with poetry woven throughout.”

As is UTOT’s custom, the production’s four performances will be split over multiple casts. Mitchell explains the importance of this for UTOT.

“Numerous performers in our cast are taking on numerous roles, both within and across performances.  It is a wealth of opportunities, but it also requires a lot of attention and focus for the performers to navigate their tracks. From moment to moment they are changing costumes, but also switching between different animals, from animal to human, and adapting their physicality and vocalism to fit each specific role  … They also really have to function as an ensemble throughout—with the amount of movement they are dealing with it’s been important to build a cohesive unit that functions as a group, while retaining all of the details of the individual creatures.”

Mitchell also explained how the themes of renewal and the cycle of life have inspired UTOT to embrace the idea of viewing nature and the animal kingdom through the eyes of a child’s imagination.

“We have used all local designers and artists in costume, hair and makeup to create a production that recycles and reinvents pieces that have been donated to the UT Opera Program from community members over the years. Our goal was to buy and ship as little as possible, preferring to use what we have homegrown in Knoxville to tell this story. It is my hope that the production will invite audience members to return to the kind of child-like state where imagination makes anything possible, and there is magic in nature.”