craven.fr (.ox.ac.uk)

On Sunday Emilie and I returned to the gorgeous Lille Opera house, this time not to see a mainstay of the repertoire, but to discover something new: Leoš Janáček's Příhody Lišky Bystroušky, better known in English as The Cunning Little Vixen, or in French as La Petite Renarde Rusée.

Obviously it would be unfair to compare the performance to Figaro; it is a smaller and simpler work with a small cast and, frankly, weak libretto. But the music itself was lovely (and from the top gallery where we were seated, we could peak down into the orchestra pit, which I thought was kind of fun), and the staging was extremely creative, and appealed to me a lot: two uneven rectangles formed the back of the stage, on which were projected images of the forest, farm house, etc., while the stage itself was set in three rows of wavy flooring, which allowed a lot of creative adaptation. It was "modern" without seeming empty or lazy. So in terms of æsthetics, both musical and visual, it was a very good show. The children who played fox cubs deserve recognition as well.

In terms of drama and vocals, on the other hand, there really isn't much to say. Not that the vocals were badly sung, per se—it's just that there was so little to sing: the few solos were anything but remarkable. This was definitely an opera in which the instrumental music overshadowed the vocal score.

But the clear weakness of the show was the story. It was fairly heavily adapted from the original, especially in Act II, which greatly reduced the number of stage roles, but also made it very difficult to make sense out of what was happening. Turning to the synopsis of the plot on Wikipedia, is no help either, since the plot changes in the second and third acts seem to mean that an alternative ending was presented. As best I could tell, in our version the Forester himself killed the vixen, however little sense that makes, and the synopsis printed in the playbill was too vague for Emilie or me to make any sense out of either. Having the human characters sing in French and the animal characters sing in Czech, with no subtitles for either, didn't make following things any easier!

So although it was a nice outing, we did leave having no idea what the story of the opera was—and for an opera clearly aimed at appealing to children, that is certainly a mark against it. Thankfully, one of the strong points of opera as an art form is that weaknesses on one level of a performance do not preclude it being excellent in others, and for me the æsthetic pleasure of the performance as a whole more than outweighed the obscure plot.