Czech composer Leoš Janá
č
ek predated Hollywood by several decades when he composed an opera in 1921 based on a serialized novella that appeared as a daily comic strip in a local newspaper. The Adventures of the Vixen Sharp-Ears by Rudolf T
ě
snohlídek and Stanislav Lolek follows the story of a female fox who is captured by a forester, but manages to escape, find a mate and raise a family.
Janá
č
ek was also way ahead of The Lion King when he began The Cunning Little Vixen, creating a libretto that has the circle of life as its underlying theme. The brilliant score depicts the animal world and humanity with warm lyricism, gentle humor and an unflinching acceptance of nature’s cycle.
Vince DeGeorge was a musical theater major at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music 25 years ago, starring in The Pirates of Penzance at the same time The Cunning Little Vixen played in the Corbett Auditorium. Since 2013, DeGeorge has been on the CCM faculty teaching movement to non-dancing actors and singers at the school. This weekend, he’s coming full circle, directing a staging of Janá
č
ek’s animal opera at the same auditorium where it played when he was a student more than two decades ago.
The Cunning Little Vixen marks DeGeorge’s first time staging an opera, and he says it’s a perfect work for his debut. The story’s mesh of animal and human worlds intrigue him. “I’m interested in the gray area where those worlds overlap,” DeGeorge says. “Animals will become humans and vice versa, and you’ll see that on stage.”
Janá
č
ek’s tale explores the unity of nature and the human desire to control what is uncontrollable, DeGeorge says. And that struggle is played out between characters like the Forester and the Vixen.
“Janá
č
ek captured that conflict in the music, and not only in the singing,” he says. “A good portion of the opera is instrumental, not sung, and (Janá
č
ek) conveys nature’s cyclical repetition, evolving as it repeats.”
The Cunning Little Vixen’s evocative score will be conducted by Maestro Mark Gibson, leading CCM’s acclaimed Philharmonia orchestra. Performers will be including movement usually assigned to dancers.
Animals outnumber humans in the cast, and the production will use contemporary dress to distinguish one group from the other. “The humans are in work clothes and the animals have a more formal look, and there’s plenty of masks involved,” DeGeorge says.
The lead roles — the Vixen, the Fox, the Forester and the Schoolmaster — are double-cast, featuring CCM artist diploma and master’s students. They will sing in English, using a translation from the original Czech by CCM emeritus faculty member David Adams.
“My colleague Ken Shaw asked me to do a translation in 2011, when the undergraduate program staged Vixen,” Adams says. “I thought he was crazy, but since I’ve been involved with Czech song repertoire, I went ahead with it.”
Adams continued to tweak his translation and he’s pleased with the result. He’s especially proud of his work in the scene where the Vixen is wooed by the Fox, and with the Forester’s finale aria, a quiet acceptance of nature’s cycle of birth and, inevitably, death.
It’s a story that is family-friendly even if the Vixen dies. If your kids have seen The Lion King, Finding Nemo or Bambi, they can handle Janá
č
ek’s evocation of a world where death is a tragic finale to life.
“There’s so much joy to this piece, even when it gets dark,” DeGeorge says. “I said earlier that the cycle of life is a giant theme, and you hear it throughout. You can either fight it or surrender to and live with it in a positive way.”
Janá
č
ek was 70 years old when he wrote The Cunning Little Vixen in 1921. The next seven years were remarkably productive; he completed three other operas that are now in the standard operatic repertoire throughout the world. But Vixen remains the most accessible. Janá
č
ek creates a thoroughly believable landscape inhabited by equally credible males and females in the animal kingdom — especially of the human variety.
CCM presents THE CUNNING LITTLE VIXEN Friday-Sunday at Corbett Auditorium in CCM Village. Tickets/more info: ccm.uc.edu.
This article appears in Apr 6-13, 2016.
