Cunning Little Vixen
Royal Opera House, in rep until 1 April
Perhaps the most heartening feature of the British and especially the London operatic scene is the frequency with which Janacek’s operas are mounted now. His progress in that respect is comparable to that of Mahler, with whom he otherwise has mercifully little in common. Mahler’s symphonies soul-search, despair, exult, usually unconvincingly, or peter out, much more convincingly, in resignation and acceptance. Janacek has no more rosy a view of the world, specifically the human world, than Mahler, and in writing operas, which Mahler not only didn’t do but one can’t imagine his doing, he portrays individuals behaving in an impressively wide variety of ghastly ways, while virtue, or lovableness or warmth tend to be passive and oppressed or eliminated. In his bleakest opera, Katya Kabanova, which ENO has on at present in a mediocre production, the end is numbing. Oddly enough, the society that Katya presents is dominated by a woman so fearful that Janacek can hardly be bothered to characterise her, but in most of his operas he can find affection for nearly any woman, and less often for the males, who tend to be violent though weak, selfish and shallow.
It was a most illuminating contrast to see his next opera, The Cunning Little Vixen, only a week later at the Royal Opera — I went to the second performance, which, to judge from reviews I have read of the first, was vastly superior: the planned performer of the Vixen, Emma Bell, was taken ill with appendicitis, and a Jette Young Artist, Elisabeth Meister, took over the part at short notice. It seems that that resulted in a certain mutedness on the opening night, but that had completely vanished three evenings later.
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