Roy Rallo on The Rake's Progress

Jan 24, 2025

Having witnessed the overwhelming devastation caused by the second world war, exiled Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, expat British poet W.H. Auden, along with the American poet Chester Kallmann constructed their 1951 opera The Rake’s Progress as a parable of humankind’s misguided struggle with the desire for happiness. When the curtain rises, we find Tom Rakewell in a sort of Eden with the ruler of his heart, Anne Truelove. Anne’s father, however, insists that his daughter cannot be had for free but must be earned with hard work. Rejecting this idea, young Tom sets his hope on trusting his will and the grace of fortune to give him whatever his ego desires. When Tom speaks out loud the words “I wish I had money,” Nick Shadow appears and tells Tom he has inherited a fortune, but that to claim it he must enter the big city. In his flight from hard work and responsibility Tom is tempted by the entertainments and inventions of the modern world offered to him by Shadow, who having cleverly induced Tom to dig his own grave, eventually reveals he is the Devil himself.

This production is the first in what was to be a significant part of David Hockney’s artistic output; his designs for opera. Subsequent designs for The Magic Flute, Tristan und Isolde, a Stravinsky Triple Bill (Rite of Spring/Rossignol/Oedipus Rex) and a French Triple Bill (Parade/Mamelles de Tiresias/l’Enfant et les Sortileges) for The Met, Die Frau Ohne Schatten and Turandot followed, but none have been so regularly revived as The Rake’s Progress, now in its 51st year of revivals of John Cox’s staging.

Like Stravinsky himself, who was inspired by a series of Hogarth etchings, Hockney returned to these same drawings to create this now famous series of visual tableau of his own, reflecting the various states of Tom’s descent from bucolic innocence to his end in Bedlam, all made vibrantly alive by John’s Cox’s concise and direct staging of the tale. How more apt than the present to contemplate the vision of artists like Stravinsky and Auden who in some sense lived the tale of the opera themselves, and to be invited to reflect on how these themes continue play out in our own lives and in our collective history.

Search Blog

Search by year