It’s no easy matter taming a vixen! The gamekeeper, who introduces one into his household, learns this the hard way, especially as the animal in question is particularly cunning, feminist and even revolutionary, calling on the hens in the barnyard to revolt against the cockerel and “forge a new world”! Alas, while freedom allows her to find love, the little vixen will pay a high price...

Premiered in Brno in 1924, Leoš Janáček’s piece, with orchestration as lush as the nature it describes, is a score apart in the history of opera, where foxes, crickets and grasshoppers, dogs and woodpeckers are rarely the heroes of the story.

A fairy tale fable, an allegory of human life, a hymn celebrating the eternal renewal of life and nature, this Cunning Little Vixen is directed by André Engel, whose sunflower fields harbour the nostalgia of childhood.