The Cunning Little Vixen, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 28 February 2026

Vixen – Vera-Lotte Böecker
Forester – Svatopluk Sem
Fox – Magdalena Kožená
Forester’s Wife, Owl – Natalia Skrycka
Schoolmaster, Mosquito – Florian Hoffmann
Priest, Badger – David Oštrek
Harašta – Carles Pachon
Dachsund, Woodpecker – Sandra Laagus
Rooster – Anna Samuil
Innkeeper’s Wife, Hen – Adriane Queiroz
Jay – Sonja Herranen
Innkeeper – Junho Hwang

Frog – Milla Aulibauer
Cricket – Paula Bredt
Grasshopper – Alexander Meieer
Young Vixen – Naz Yilmaz
Frantík – Otto Glass
Pepík – Alia Engel
First fox cub – Paloma Couloumy

Director – Ted Huffman
Assistant director – Sonoko Kamimura
Set designs – Nadja Sofie Eller
Costumes – Astrid Klein
Lighting – Bertrand Couderc
Choreography – Pim Veulings
Dramaturgy – Detlef Giese, Elisabeth Kühne

Children’s Choir of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden (director: Vinzenz Weissenburger)
Staatsopernchor Berlin (director: Dani Juris)
Staatskapelle Berlin
Sir Simon Rattle (conductor)

Images: Monika Rittershaus

Believe it or not, this was the first ever performance at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden of The Cunning Little Vixen, more than a century after its world premiere in Brno. It is not that it has never been performed in Berlin before, of course not. Walter Felsenstein’s 1956 (German-language) Komische Oper production was a landmark in the reception of the work and, more broadly, of Janáček outside the Czech lands. In 1965, Felsenstein’s production was made into a magical film for East German television, conducted by no less than Václav Neumann. Yet the house a few hundred metres away left the opera alone and indeed showed little interest in most of Janáček’s operas, even as they were revived elsewhere, in Europe or beyond. Simon Rattle’s passion for the composer, combined with his now long-term collaboration with the Staatsoper and Daniel Barenboim’s trust in Rattle, has now resulted in a number of Janáček house premieres, of which this must surely be the most surprising. Rattle conducted the opera for the first time almost fifty years ago, at Glyndebourne, in 1977. He has also conducted it with the Royal Opera and the LSO, as well as with the Berlin Philharmonic. So here we had an inviting blend of novelty and experience, mirrored onstage by the combination of adult professionals and child performers (acrobats as well as singers).

How did that work in practice? Rattle certainly conducted it with the knowledge, sympathy, and understanding that would entail. Pacing was such that one did not notice it; it proceeded naturally and, in general, at the rate of a sung play, as Janáček tends to require. The composer’s language had been fully internalised and put to good musicodramatic use, even if the Staatskapelle Berlin – understandably – did not always sound quite so much at home in this music as other opera orchestras (or indeed the LSO, which has taken to it like ducks to water). It was a golden, Straussian Janáček we heard: nothing wrong with that and indeed one might sometimes say the same about the most ‘authentic’ Janáček of all, from Czech orchestras. There is in their Janáček, though, something I did not quite hear in this case: not only ‘tradition’, that slippery, movable, even questionable feast; but also an instinctive feel of how the orchestral music speaks, sings, propels, and even bites, in its own extraordinary language. Playing was on its own terms, though, excellent throughout; I should not exaggerate a relatively minor reservation. 

As has been the case for his Janáček performances in both London and Berlin, Rattle had assembled and/or attracted a fine cast too. Vera-Lotte Böecker’s Vixen was characterful, animated, and sympathetic without being remotely cutesy. This world of Nature should never be sentimentalised. Magdalena Kožená offered a proper, more masculine complement with her Fox; the two matched one another at times as if in a Mozart instrumental serenade. Svatopluk Sem was a distinguished, humane Forester, his final hymn to Nature and its life cycles properly moving. (By now, the Staatskapelle too seemed more fully inside Janáček’s idiom.) Natalia Skrycka, Anna Samuil, David Oštrek, and Carles Pachon particularly stood out to me in their respective roles. Samuil’s Rooster proved a delightful, scene-stealing Rooster. But this was casting in depth too. No one disappointed, right down to the smaller animal roles very well taken by members of the Staatsoper’s International Opera Studio and also of its Children’s Choir. Choral singing in general was of a high standard throughout. 

Unfortunately, Ted Huffman’s production proved a disappointment. It had its moments, a highpoint being the imaginative presentation of the vixen’s running amok in the chicken coup, feathers flying across the stage as hens’ costumes were punctured. At that point, following a slow and disjointed start in stage terms, all seemed to be coming together nicely. It was, alas, difficult to discern much of a line in what followed, ideas briefly floated only to vanish without trace or recur arbitrarily, as in characters’ typing of letters towards Terynka during interludes, which added little other than confusion. All took place ultimately in a white box, Nadja Sofie Eller’s designs offering neither natural wonder nor obvious deracinated contrast. For some reason, great play was made of dressing the chorus in highly individualised human outfits: well designed as such by Astrid Klein, but it was unclear to what end. Lighting seemed to be little more than simple on and off; perhaps a point was being made, but again I am not sure what. There was scope for the children to display their skills, undoubtedly welcome; yet integration into the plot, be it of opera or production, proved elusive.

Insofar as there was an overall idea, it seemed to be to blur the boundaries between animals and humans: fair enough, but the blurring seemed, well, blurred in focus and ultimately arbitrary. This was a different attempt at realism from Felsenstein’s, from that of Peter Sellars too (for Rattle and the BPO in 2017). If preferable to the latter, which was often frankly bizarre, it could surely have learned something from the former, even at this distance, not least in terms of overall coherence and indeed of a sense of what the work, or the production for that matter, might be about. Elsewhere, the accomplishment of that one scene with the chickens threw into relief what came across as a lack of basic, general direction elsewhere. Some scenes more resembled an early stage of rehearsal than a finished staging. 

This is necessarily impressionistic, but I could not help noticing that younger and more international elements, visiting or resident, appeared distinctly less enthusiastic than the older, local core of the audience. If I were to hazard a potential explanation, I might note that it could hardly have been a matter of theatrical style and values. The production had nothing obviously in common with critical German theatre—unless that were why some approved, which I should not discount entirely. But I do not think it was only that; there seemed to be a genuine excitement at encountering the work, notwithstanding those Rattle performances at the Philharmonie in 2017. Those of us who have seen it in multiple stagings may be, according to taste, more critical or more jaded. Yet it is no bad thing to be reminded of the joy of encountering a Janáček opera for the first time; of that there appeared to be much in evidence.

Berlin Festtage (5) – Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Don Giovanni, 17 April 2022

Don Giovanni – Michael Volle
Donna Anna – Slávka Zámečníková
Don Ottavio – Bogdan Volkov
Commendatore – Peter Rose
Donna Elvira – Elsa Dreisig
Leporello – Riccardo Fassi
Masetto – David Oštrek
Zerlina – Serena Sáenz

Vincent Huguet (director)
Aurélie Maestre (set designs)
Clémence Pernoud (costumes)
Irene Selka (lighting)
Robert Pflanz (video)
Louis Geisler (dramaturgy)

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus master: Martin Wright)

Staatskapelle Berlin
Thomas Guggeis (conductor)

Don Giovanni (Michael Volle), Commendatore (Peter Rose), Leporello (Riccardo Fassi)
Images: Matthias Baus

Don Giovanni was the first opera Daniel Barenboim conducted: at the 1973 Edinburgh Festival. Nearly fifty years on, this new production was eagerly awaited, if more for Barenboim than for director Vincent Huguet, whose previous contributions towards this Berlin Da Ponte ‘trilogy’ (see here and here) have generally been considered disappointing at best. Alas, Barenboim, whose incendiary conducting of Peter Mussbach’s production here on Unter den Linden in 2007 remains one of my Mozart operatic highlights, had to withdraw, replaced by Staatskapellmeister Thomas Guggeis. 

Not that Guggeis fared poorly, far from it. In such circumstances, it is difficult to know quite how much is Conductor B and how much is Conductor B leading what is essentially Conductor A’s conception. Guggeis had been involved with rehearsals, and was in any case due to conduct a later performance. There was certainly no question of ‘period’ faddism. Possible flashpoints went unscathed, the Overture’s opening and the Stone Guest scene itself taken at a well-chosen tempo that enhanced rather than detracted from the depth and grandeur of Mozart’s abidingly theological conception. Guggeis always drew something approaching the best from the Staatskapelle Berlin, and generally ensured fire, drama, and where appropriate depth and heft. The all-too-familiar conflation of Prague and Vienna versions was used, but that was not his fault. Damage wrought to the second act was minimised by continuing flow. If, ultimately, there was not that Furtwänglerian Fernhören one would have expected with Barenboim, who is to say what we should have heard in something entirely of Guggeis’s conception. Here is a conductor who always impresses; this was no exception. 

As for Huguet’s staging, it made some creditable efforts to connect with what we had seen before, but alternating as they did between vague and specific, without much in the way of rhyme or reason, it was difficult to know what to make of them. It seemed to be set in the present, the baritonal-heroic baton passed slightly awkwardly from Guglielmo to the Count to Don Giovanni. Leporello likewise seemed to be picking up from Figaro and Donna Elvira from the Countess. Whether they were intended to be the same people a generation on, or simply to be read with reference to what had gone before was never clear. On the one hand, there were clear references; on the other, much seemed not to make sense at all when one followed them through. Giovanni was a photographer, or was credited as such, though it seemed to be Leporello who took the photographs—of his master’s conquests, of course. Displayed on a tablet, projected onto a screen for the Catalogue Aria, the similarity of their subjects, without exception young, slim, and conventionally good-looking (see also Così) was markedly at odds with the variety of which Leporello sang. Whether this were a deliberate mismatch or mere carelessness was unclear; to be honest, it become difficult to care very much.

 

Why Elvira briefly became a politician/dignitary, handing Giovanni a prize for his retrospective during the first-act finale, I have no idea; at any rate, she took her wig off—or did she put it back on?—and that line of transformation abruptly closed. I wondered whether there was also a hint at Don Ottavio and Donna Anna reincarnating Ferrando and Dorabella, but perhaps not. A strange gap at the end of the first scene, entirely halting the action for a less-than-necessary scene change, did not do wonders for continuity; perhaps it was a metaphor. Don Giovanni's brief appearance in a coffin, which first I thought was a bath (!) might have seemed suggestive, but it was simply part of an unconvinving move, for no evident reason, to a chapel of rest. And why he, supposedly dead (straightforwardly murdered here) stood in the wings to watch the scena ultima was never clear either. Perhaps he too was trying to work out whether there had been any meaning to what had just unfolded. (In the programme, Huguet says that the hero died, merely adding to the confusion.) There was little, if anything, in the way of social differentiation, let alone of sin and punishment (that despite the Commendatore suddenly, arbitrarily, becoming a courtroom judge). One might have wondered why Mozart and Da Ponte bothered. 

Singing was mostly admirable, though it cannot be said that the production afforded singers much in the way of inspiration. Michael Volle is ever a consummate professional; and so he was here, fully in command of the title role and its demands. Riccardo Fassi’s agile Leporello provided vocal complement and contrast, differently dark in hue. Slávka Zámečníková and Bogdan Volkov perhaps lacked a little in dramatic stage presence, but that was as much a matter of the production as anything else. Guggeis might have drawn out the seria distinction of their parts more strongly, but again that would not necessarily have made much sense, given what unfolded (or did not) onstage. They sang well, at any rate, as did Elsa Dresig in a welcome return as a volatile Donna Elvira. If Peter Rose were on occasion slightly woolly as the Commendatore, David Oštrek and Serena Sáenz offered a winningly straightforward peasant couple, physical and vocal selves as one. If an air of missed opportunity proved impossible to dispel, responsibility lay squarely with the production.

Usher, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 18 January 2020

Alter Orchesterprobensaal

Images: Martin Argyroglo
Lady Madeline (Ruth Rosenfeld)

Roderick Usher – David Oštrek

The Friend – Martin Gerke

Lady Madeline – Ruth Rosenfeld

Doctor – Dominic Kraemer

Philippe Quesne (director, set designs, lighting)

Christin Haschke (costumes)

Sébastien Alazet (sound design)

Members of the Staatskapelle Berlin and its Orchestral Academy

Marit Strindlund (conductor)

What to do with an unfinished artwork? It is not, perhaps, the right question: different works or part-works, different circumstances, different performers, different listeners, will have different answers. Right or wrong, however, we continue to ask it, and at that level of generalisation or abstraction, there is more than one possibility. One can perform a fragment, with or without reconstruction. The answer to whether to reconstruct will depend both on inclination and on possibility: the condition of fragments will be such that what one saw or heard would make little sense without considerable intervention. Tradition will also play a part: the much-abused Süssmayr completion of Mozart’s Requiem – to my mind, though not to many others, unfairly abused – has a standing, a familiarity, a performance tradition of its own. It also retains a mystery at its heart – and probably always will. If original writing is to be involved, does one attempt pastiche or something more adventurous, more personal? Where does this leave already fraught issues of fidelity in performance? Is that opposition a helpful one at all, begging far too many questions of its own?

Lady Madeline, Roderick (David Oštrek), Doctor (Dominc Kraemer)

Having raised such questions, I shall now move them a little to one side, neither forgetting them nor retaining my focus upon them. In that, I am echoing my own experience of having attended this LINDEN 21 performance of Usher in the old orchestral rehearsal room of the Berlin State Opera. What we saw and heard is not a reconstruction of Debussy’s La Chute de la maison Usher such as was first seen staged on the main stage at this very house in 1979 (courtesy of Juan Allende Blin’s reconstruction). Is it a completion? It depends what one means, but that was not in itself the point; this is not primarily an evening of metatheatre, nor does it seem intended to be. Better, then to say what it is: a chamber opera in three short acts, coming to about ninety minutes in total, by Annelies Van Parys and Gaea Schoeters, incorporating Debussy’s music and outline(s), themselves founded on Edgar Allen Poe’s story. (I suggest the plural ‘outlines’, given that Debussy wrote three libretti, each considering the story from a different standpoint.)

What especially interested me in what I heard was a particular aspect of the relationship between music by the two composers. It was not so much that I could not tell where one ended and the other began, as that it was in general very clear indeed where the one (Van Parys) had begun, without that sounding incongruent or even in a different voice. Debussy’s music evidently fascinates Van Parys. I have written before of her chamber version of Pelléas et Mélisande, as performed by English Touring Opera in 2015. Usher, however, not only presented a very different task; that task or, perhaps better, project was fulfilled and always intended to be fulfilled in a very different way. That itself is worked out in different ways. Musically, this is not a Debussyan ensemble, nor even an updated version thereof. There is malevolence, yes, such as one might extrapolate – reduce? transmute? – from Pelléas. But it is perhaps more akin to a spectralist standpoint taken upon what we might think, correctly or no, to be ‘original’, which approach would be in keeping with some of Van Parys’s other music.

Doctor, Friend (Martin Gerke), Lady Madeline, Roderick

There is a ‘horror music’ here far more interesting, at least to me, than anything popularly associated with the term. There is ‘atmospheric music’ too, though not necessarily of the Debussyan variety, one can sense a starting-point in Poe’s – Debussy’s? – mists, stagnant waters, and, perhaps inevitably with respect to the house itself, in Bluebeard’s Castle too. The ambiguity between house as building and house as family brings to the fore another, more contemporary (to us) focus: surprising, perhaps, yet undoubtedly disturbing. References to race offer clear resonances with far-Right politics. The figure of the doctor, already elevated by Debussy into a more important figure, a rival for Roderick in his incestuous love with his sister Lady Madeline, takes on an additional, political significance: a manipulator of emotions, of sickness, of beliefs and practices we might have thought we had gone beyond. Increasingly sinister, aggressive, and liable to speak as well as to sing, is he perhaps, rather than the hapless ‘house’, however understood, the real actor here? Roderick’s visitor is surely well advised to leave.

Roderick and ensemble

In the context of such interesting ideas and committed performances from all concerned – three fine baritones, David Oštrek, Martin Gerke, and Dominic Kramer; the multi-talented Ruth Rosenfeld, equially at home in spoken and vocal theatre; and an instrumental ensemble with excellent direction by Marit Strindlund – it is a pity that Philippe Quesne’s production, adept at making eerily domestic use of this rehearsal room, ultimately opts for a little too much in the way of a commercial horror film aesthetic. Multiple television screens showing the ill-fated house on fire add little to the drama. What we see too often neither resonates with nor works productively against the grain of the opera itself. There will, however, be opportunities for other productions, I am sure. In the meantime, the work having been co-commissioned by the Staatsoper Unter den Lindn and the Folkoperan Stockholm, three other companies (Opera Vlaanderen, Muziektheater Transparant, and Nanterre-Amandiers centre dramatique national) have joined with them for this co-production. There is no one way to ‘complete’, but this path has proved fruitful.