"I no longer have time to think about myself. In no year have I worked as much mentally as in this one," wrote the composer Leoš Janáček while he was working on The Cunning Little Vixen . The composition absorbed him completely, so meticulously did he try to translate the sounds of nature and the animal world into music. Janáček got the inspiration for the story about a young vixen who comes into contact with the human world from a newspaper comic. Nevertheless, The Cunning Little Vixen is not a playful fairytale opera, on the contrary. Two worlds collide, that of the animals and that of the humans. The community around the forester and his family as well as the other villagers is cruel and at the same time full of longing for a better life - but who has the answer to the question of what a real life is like? When the forester and the vixen meet in the forest, nature and apparent civilization come face to face. Thus, The Cunning Little Vixen explicitly shows no cute anecdotes about animals, but a pragmatic, uncompromising world in which it is all about survival. And yet there is room for the love between vixen and fox. Janáček succeeds in sounding out the animal in man and the human in the animal, thus holding up a mirror to us. Almost 101 years to the day after its premiere in Brno in 1924, Stephan Kimmig now turns his attention to an opera full of contrasts and the longing to find a place where one can live free of rules, following Der Prinz von Homburg and Das Rheingold . But does this place even exist?

The Cunning Little Vixen

Stuttgart Opera

Gold or love? At the beginning of the tetralogy there is a momentous choice that, strictly speaking, is not a choice. Because Alberich is denied love, he renounces it forever and takes possession of the glittering raw material, which, forged into a ring, promises dominion over all creatures. With this cardinal error, Wagner sets his great world narrative in motion, in which others will also - even if briefly - exchange love for the prospect of gaining power, which sooner or later leads to collapse. Stephan Kimmig shows the mythical beginning as a sad, grotesque end-time game. Gods, giants and dwarves meet in the ruins of a night circus: a playground for exploring dizzying heights and fears of falling, but also a metaphor for a world stuck in a frantic standstill, where three Rhinemaidens of the post-millennial generation are undeterred in their search for ways into the future.

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The Rheingold

The Staatstheater Stuttgart

A trail of violence runs through the cursed dynasty of the Atrides long before this opera begins: Elektra's grandfather fed his own sons to his brother, her father Agamemnon sacrificed Elektra's sister Iphigenia, the desperate mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisth slaughtered Agamemnon with an axe in the bath. The children cannot find peace either: Elektra cannot mourn, desperate and raw, she dwells on her hatred. Like must be repaid in kind, the murderous mother and her lover must die. While her sister Chrysotemis refuses to join her, her brother Orest is to take vengeance for their beloved father: The next generation picks up the axe...

Stephan Kimmig

Events

Upcoming events

Apr 7 - Jun 4, 2026

Elektra · Deutsche Oper am Rhein

Past events

Nov 9 - Dec 10, 2025

The Cunning Little Vixen · Staatsoper Stuttgart

Apr 20 - Jun 13, 2024

The Rheingold · Staatsoper Stuttgart

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