Most operas are about people. Leoš Janáček wrote one about a fox, and then quietly made it about everything else: love, aging, freedom, and the way the forest keeps going long after any of us are gone.
The Dallas Opera brings The Cunning Little Vixen to the Winspear Opera House starting Oct. 30. It’s been a long wait. The company hasn’t staged this opera in 26 years and hasn’t presented anything by Janáček in 22. This time it arrives in director Barrie Kosky’s production, created for the Bavarian State Opera in Munich in 2022 and making its North American premiere here in Dallas.
The story starts small. A forester catches a fox cub in the woods and carries her home. She grows up in his yard, tied and watched, a wild thing learning the rules of a world that was never meant for her. One day she breaks loose and runs back to the forest.
What follows is her life, the whole of it. She hunts. She claims a home. She falls in love with a handsome fox, and the two of them raise a family. She spends her days looking over her shoulder, because that is the price of being free. And while she lives all of that, the humans around her, the forester, the schoolmaster and the parson, grow older and lonelier and keep wondering where the years went.
Janáček was nearly 70 when he wrote it, and you can feel that in the music. The Cunning Little Vixen premiered in 1924, late in a life that came to fame late, and it carries the clear-eyed tenderness of a man who has seen a lot of seasons pass and has made peace with the fact that the world will keep turning without him. It is funny and bright on the surface. Underneath, it aches.
Kosky is the right director for that. He has staged work at Bayreuth, Salzburg, Glyndebourne and Covent Garden, and he’s known for productions that are bold, theatrical and unafraid. The company calls this one bold and glitzy. Expect color and spectacle, with the sadness still underneath.
Estonian soprano Mirjam Mesak sings the Vixen in her U.S. debut. She’s joined by baritone Zachary Nelson, basses Andrew Harris and Brandon Cedel, mezzo-sopranos Shannon Keegan, Lindsay Ammann and Kayla Nanto, tenors Freddie Ballentine, Brian Calì and Johnny Brown, and sopranos Alyssa Dessoye and Ashley Townsley. Music director Emmanuel Villaume conducts The Dallas Opera Orchestra, the TDO Chorus and the Greater Dallas Choral Society.
The opera is sung in Czech with English supertitles, and the language matters more here than in most operas. Janáček shaped his melodies around the natural rise and fall of spoken Czech and the folk songs of his home region, Moravia. The libretto is written in a Moravian dialect. That’s the same corner of the Czech lands many of Texas’ Czech settlers came from in the 1800s, bringing their music, their churches and their kolaches with them. Hear this opera in Dallas and you’re hearing something of the people who helped build Central Texas.
It’s also short, about an hour and 40 minutes from start to finish. That makes it an easy invitation for anyone who has always been curious about opera but never quite brave enough to try one.
Performances are Friday, Oct. 30, at 7:30 p.m.; Sunday, Nov. 1, at 2 p.m.; Wednesday, Nov. 4, at 7:30 p.m.; and Saturday, Nov. 7, at 7:30 p.m. at the Winspear Opera House, 2403 Flora St. Tickets start at $29 and are available through The Dallas Opera or by calling 214-443-1000.
The season opened with The Elixir of Love, a sunny comedy, and you can read our preview of it here. The Vixen is a quieter, deeper evening, one that tends to stay with people on the drive home.
