"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

Rigoletto wants to protect his daughter Gilda from the abusive Duke at all costs – but his revenge turns into the cruelest of all defeats: It's not the Duke, but Gilda who falls victim. Is this the fulfillment of the gruesome curse imposed on Rigoletto at the beginning? Verdi combines the dark force of a revenge thriller with the tragedy of an unconditional, yet one-sided love – and at the same time creates an explosive political drama, which Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito bring to the fore in their production.

Rigoletto

English, Czech, German, French, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, Italian, Greek and Turkish. These are the languages that will be sung in the premieres of the 2025/26 season. That’s quite a lot. But when you consider that people from more than 50 nations work at the Stuttgart State Theatres, that’s probably not even a fraction of the languages that are spoken here. Opera as a genre, on the other hand, has a world language in music with which it can communicate universally, directly and across language barriers. The opening concert with the State Orchestra, the State Opera Chorus, the ensemble and guests on the first day of the new season will focus on a wide variety of music from home. And the great thing is: when music, experiences and memories are shared, they become more, not less.

Music from home

Musik von Zuhause

“I don’t believe in the right to work; I prefer to believe that the greatest right of man is to do nothing,“ said Rossini. Angelina, his Cinderella, is far from that – she performs slave labour in her bankrupt stepfather’s family. How a prince, for whom the bank account and an army of servants work, gets her out of this precarious situation is a world-famous fairy tale from Charles Perrault to Disney. Rossini tells the story of the power of honest feelings to survive without the well-known miraculous elements, but there is one great miracle: love at first sight. Not at the ball, but when the prince, as a servant, inspects the potential brides in advance. Surrounding this is the madness of exalted dreams of ascent and terrible scenarios of descent, which drives Rossini’s characters forward just as much as the insane energy of his music. The young mezzo-soprano Itzeli del Rosario, who is a member of the Stuttgart ensemble since this season, makes her debut in the title role of Cinderella.

Itzeli del Rosario

Events

Upcoming events

Nov 9 - Dec 10, 2025

The Cunning Little Vixen · Staatsoper Stuttgart

Apr 13 - May 22, 2026

La Cenerentola · Staatsoper Stuttgart

Past events

Nov 9 - Dec 10, 2025

The Cunning Little Vixen · Staatsoper Stuttgart

Oct 12 - Nov 11, 2025

Rigoletto · Staatsoper Stuttgart

Future and recently performed repertoire

Maddalena in Rigoletto by Verdi

Staatsoper Stuttgart

Dachshund / Woodpecker in The Cunning Little Vixen by Janáček

Staatsoper Stuttgart

Angelina in Cinderella by Rossini

Staatsoper Stuttgart

About

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