The Cunning Little Vixen the English National Opera) under the direction of Colin Graham, with conductor Colin Davis, and with scenery and costume designs by Barry Kay. In 1981, the New York City Opera mounted a production in English based on images created by Maurice Sendak and conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas in his company debut. It starred soprano Gianna Rolandi as Vixen Sharp-Ears and baritone Richard Cross as the Forester. Glyndebourne Festival Opera staged it in 2012, directed by Melly Still, and a revival was included in the Glyndebourne Festival for 2016 with Christopher Purves as the Forester and Elena Tsallagova as the
Wozzeck on the compositional direction of "Wozzeck". In a letter to his wife written in June 1918, he wrote, "There is a little bit of me in his character, since I have been spending these war years just as dependent on people I hate, have been in chains, sick, captive, resigned, in fact, humiliated." His correspondence and notebooks dating from the war years reveal a painful obsession with completing "Wozzeck". Compositional sketches and notes for both Wozzeck and the "" of Three Pieces for Orchestra that Berg made during the war are strewn with disjointed fragments of military ordinances and terminology.