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. Vixen doesn’t end with a death, as Katya does, but the heroine is shot dead by the poacher Harasta earlier in the act, and, since she is an adorable, amoral creature, that is dreadful, yet it curiously but movingly doesn’t upset one as much as it might. Partly that is because the scene moves rapidly on to the village inn, where two of the leading human characters are suffering specifically human emotions, of regret at lost opportunities, a finished friendship, ageing.
But it is also because, thanks to the radiance of Janacek’s music, the rhythms that sustain life, human and animal, push us forward, so that we are made to care more about what will happen next than about what has happened. It is this feature of his art, so characteristic of almost all of it, that makes Janacek seem alternately the warmest-hearted of composers and the most jubilantly detached. We can care about his characters as we can about Puccini’s, but more often we don’t, even when they enchant or fascinate us. It’s as if, with the shattering conclusion of Katya, Janacek has had enough of suffering women, and his gaze can broaden, first in Vixen, to the whole living world, and then, even more extraordinarily in The House of the Dead, to a collection of wretched convicts, many of them justly imprisoned, but all of them creatures within whom ‘there is the spark of Divinity’.
Given the pantheism of Vixen, it is the orchestra which carries the largest communicative power. I can’t believe that has ever been so triumphantly achieved as by the Royal Opera orchestra under Charles Mackerras, who here has gone some way beyond his understanding and love of the score even since he made the celebrated Decca recording. From the opening bars on we were at a level of intensity and continuity which has to be called sublime. And it seemed clear that all the performers on the stage felt the same, for there was no weak link, no sung or danced phrase that didn’t seem inspired. Great voices are not required for this music, though Christopher Maltman, the Forester, has one, and uses it to supreme expressive effect. And Matthew Rose, a really remarkable young bass, makes of the difficult role of Harasta the Poacher something movingly complex, not merely a villain who slays a vixen, but a thwarted, puzzled, angry man who doesn’t want to be outwitted and mocked by his prey.
In this 20-year-old production of Bill Bryden, with the extremely detailed, semi-realistic designs of William Dudley, something close to the ideal is achieved: this kind of staging is not required for many operas, but it is for this one. Atmosphere is not enough: the genius is in the detail. Surely no one taking part in this production can fail to realise that, at any rate this time round, something remarkable is happening: in fact, the greatest evening that the Royal Opera has provided for a very long time.
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