Some thoughts on The Rake’s Progress

Jan 23, 2025

by Principal Guest Conductor, Steven White

The readily apparent aptness of the music for the text (and vice versa) in Igor Stravinsky and W. H. Auden’s The Rake’s Progress is one of the great wonders of 20th-century operatic accomplishment. It is a creative collaboration that should be honored with the reverential tones with which we celebrate Mozart and Da Ponte, Verdi and Boito, Strauss and Hofmannsthal. Not only did they create the story together, but they united their respective languages of word and music in an uncommonly common purpose.

Auden’s craft and rhetorical demeanor is not far distant from that of the Enlightenment poet Alexander Pope—always clear, always beautifully stylized and rife with proverbial wisdom. Which is exactly what must be said of Stravinsky’s music. It isn’t derivative merely as a trick. His use of 18th-century style is the exactly appropriate musical vessel in which to infuse dramatic immediacy and symbolic efficacy to realize the details of the drama.

Composed in Los Angeles just five years or so after the end of World War II, The Rake’s Progress is the culmination of Stravinsky’s nearly thirty-year “neo-classical” experimentation, breathing life into widely discarded musical forms that had been deemed by many to have long since served their purpose. In many of the pieces of this period, Stravinsky gravitated to ancient classical subject matter—his operatic oratorio Oedipus Rex, as well as the ballets Apollon musagète and Orpheus. So it comes as no surprise that references to Greek mythology abound in The Rake’s Progress, particularly towards the end of the opera when Tom believes in his madness that he is Adonis, and that Anne is Venus.

“Neo-classical” implies an obvious duality—a conscious embrace of both the past and the present. Stravinsky very purposefully and openly appropriates the style of Mozart (Così fan tutte and Don Giovanni, most particularly), Händel, even Bach and Monteverdi. But this warm luminescence of diatonic comfort is very often refracted through modern sonorities and angular melodic contours. The effect is both marvelous and disturbing. As Tom says at the top of Act II, “I walk an endless hall of chandeliers, in light that blinds, in light that seers, reflected in a million smiles...”

Stravinsky’s opera is a “numbers” opera, as he himself described it, incorporating the formal procedures of 18th-century operatic construction with set pieces—arias, duets, larger ensembles and choruses—mortared together by “secco recitativo” (recitative accompanied by harpsichord) and recitativo accompagnato (recitative accompanied by orchestra). The interplay of old and new style is on display from the opening notes of the prelude, a toccata for trumpets and horns that hearkens back in spirit to the introductory bars of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo of 1607, the first great opera in history.

Complete musical analysis of the opera is a nearly endless expedition into a mine of wonders great and small. The specificity of each note, the contour of every phrase, the color of every harmonic inuendo—everything has significance and purpose, even while the music seems to unfold with effortless rightness. The very first sung note, for example, is the C-natural with which Anne begins the phrase, “The woods are green.” The significance of this first note is that it is at odds with the key of the music, A Major, established in the introduction. For one tiny moment—less than a second long—Anne is on an island of A minor, singing a cappella for this one quarter note, and quite at odds with the pastoral certainty of the ambience of the scene. Later she does the exact same thing with the text, “Love tells no lies.” Yet, in harmonic context of the music, the word “love” is itself a lie. This half-step duality, serving as a hinge between major and minor, is representative of the kind of detail that permeates the opera in its entirety. Nearly every bar is like a geode waiting to be cracked open to reveal the wondrous crystals that sparkle within.

Tom Rakewell is one of the most wonderfully delicious roles available to any tenor. The sheer beauty with which Stravinsky and Auden clothe his utterances is luxurious in the extreme. His first recitative and aria, “Here I stand,” begins with the same half-step as Anne’s first words, unfolding at first with true classically maestoso string writing that undergirds his confidence. Yet when he starts the aria proper, he is accompanied only by two bassoons somewhat mockingly pointing out the folly of his text, “Since it is not by merit we rise or we fall, but the favour of Fortune that governs us all, why should I labour for what in the end she will give me for nothing if she be my friend?” And here we see the beginning of Tom’s demise.

It’s difficult for us to accuse Tom of being completely evil, particularly when he so readily expresses his remorse at every turn, and with such seeming sincerity. His C-sharp minor cavatina in the brothel scene is essentially an inward looking and regretful torch song of brief but aching pathos, “Love, too frequently betrayed for some plausible desire or the world’s enchanted fire.” Supported by Mozartian string syncopation and seductive clarinet undulations, the musical style is at once Apollonian and Dionysian, demonstrating the conflict and guilt that is beginning to eat away at his being. Then, without break, the chorus sings, “How sad a song,” a variant in the minor mode of the quintet, “Di scrivermi ogni giorno,” from Act I of Così fan tutte.

Tom opens the second act with one of the greatest English-language tenor arias of the 20th or any century, “Vary the song, O London, change!” Here Stravinsky and Auden are equally profound in their treatment of symbolism. Auden writes “disband your notes and let them range,” indicating Tom’s weariness of the same old futile pursuits that fail to provide him happiness. Stravinsky sets the text to music that has plaintive oboe, clarinet, and bassoon twining and “ranging” up and down the scale with endearing suggestion. In the fast middle section of the aria, Tom says, “Up, Nature! The hunt is on, the pack is in full cry.” Here Stravinsky employs the same unique accompanimental figure that Mozart uses in Dorabella’s “Smanie implacabili,” when she says, “Implacable desires, which are torturing me, do not leave this soul of mine until my anguish makes me die.” Again, Così fan tutte appears an obvious point of inspiration for Stravinsky.

In the final scene, once Tom has been rendered insane, Stravinsky goes back even further into musical history to inform the music with perfect poignancy. As he makes his confession to Anne (who he thinks is Venus), Tom (thinking himself Adonis) sings, beginning with the same half-step interval noted from the beginning of the opera, “In a foolish dream, in a gloomy labyrinth I hunted shadows, disdaining thy true love; forgive thy servant, who repents his madness, forgive Adonis and he shall faithful prove.” Calling upon a solo oboe over murmuring strings, Stravinsky gives this profound moment the same sense of world-weariness and resignation as we find in J. S. Bach’s Cantata 82, Ich habe genug, a poetic setting from the New Testament in which Simeon prays, upon seeing the infant Christ, “Lord dismiss thy servant, for I have seen thy salvation.” Ancient Simeon now awaits his eternal sleep. In like token, Adonis (Tom), having at last seen Venus (Anne), is ready for oblivion, and asks to sleep on her breast.

When he awakes, Tom realizes that Anne is gone forever and cries out, “My heart breaks. I feel the chill of death’s approaching wing. Orpheus, strike from thy lyre a swan-like music, and weep, ye nymphs and shepherds of these Stygian fields, weep for Adonis, the beautiful, the young: Weep for Adonis whom Venus loved.” Here Stravinsky pays homage to the iconic and profound Possente spirto of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo with an outpouring of improvisational-sounding vocal writing that is both breathtaking and heartbreaking.

Of course, every character, not just Tom, gets the same “neo-classical” magical treatment and special care from librettist and composer. Anne Trulove is very obviously, as her name makes clear, of the same faithful ilk (if not fiery demeanor) as Constanze in Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail. Trulove and Constanze are both synonyms for fidelity, the latter also being the name of Mozart’s wife. While Anne’s constancy may be part of the reason that her role is sometimes said to be monochromatic, compared to that of Tom, she certainly gets what must be one of the biggest show stopping moments in all of 20th-century opera. Her great scena that brings act one to a close is a hallmark example of the recitative-aria-cabaletta form that opera lovers associate with Contessa, Donna Anna, and Fiordiligi of Mozart. “I go, I go to him” is as virtuosic and technically difficult a piece of stage singing as has ever been written. And sopranos have Auden himself to thank (blame?) for the high C at the end. Stravinsky had intended it for the octave below, saying that it was otherwise impossible. Auden convinced him that it was necessary to let Anne live a little!

Baba the Turk, while among the strangest and not clearly understood characters in all of opera, is allowed to express herself through a “rage aria,” a very recognizable operatic trope. “Scorned! Abused! Neglected!” is an angular and outrageous outburst of anger and hurt feelings replete with frequent prop damage. But her creators have given her an endearing side as well—a kind of worldly wisdom that she sings with lyric confidence to Anne as she takes her exit.

Nick Shadow’s musical and textual treatment deserves considerably more attention than can be given here. But it should be noted that Nick is the element that most brings out the “neo” in Stravinsky’s “neo-classical” approach. Take for example the introduction to the graveyard scene in Act III. Creeping ominously forward along the jagged path of an octatonic scale, the prelude, written for solo string quartet, is as far from anything that would be associated with classical form or harmony, save for the restrained number of its instrumental forces. As the scene develops, Stravinsky achieves a bizarre and macabre atmosphere with the use of harpsichord by itself to accompany the fateful card game happening on stage. This “classical” instrument used in a very “neo” and brittle way, charges the entire scene with profound discomfort and foreboding. At last, with Nick Shadow’s defeat, we sense something akin to Don Giovanni’s demise, as the orchestra rises up in a towering infernal march of tremendous power.

Finally, some mention should be given to the chorus, who, whether whores, roaring boys, or sad dwellers of Bedlam, are given some of the pithiest and proverb-like things to say. For example, in the brothel scene they pronounce with accurate observation, “What is sweeter to human nature than to quarrel over nothing at all?” The insane dwellers of Bedlam, speaking to Tom tell him frankly, “Madness cancels every vow!” as he protests that “Venus” has promised to visit him. Everywhere and always, Auden and Stravinsky unceasingly display their rhetorical and expressive genius.

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