Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
The Rake’s Progress seems to illustrate Dr. Johnson’s remark that opera is ‘an exotic and irrational entertainment’. A Russian-born composer living in the United States enlists the help of an expatriate English poet to turn a set of pictures by an 18th century artist into an opera set in the England of that artist Hogarth’s day. Written in the mid-20th century, the opera consciously adopts the conventions and some of the musical style of the 18th, yet remains one of the few operas by a modern composer to have a place in the repertoire, however precarious.
Stravinsky knew what he was doing in his first full-length opera: setting himself deliberately against what post-Wagnerian music drama stood for – its musical continuity, inflation of the orchestral part, and pretense of dramatic realism. Stravinsky preferred to write pre-Gluck ‘number opera’, advancing the story in recitatives, commenting and expressing emotion in set-pieces – arias, duets and ensembles. The principal inspiration was Mozart, and The Rake is Mozartian in scale, requiring an orchestra of 35 and faring best in small to medium-size theatres.
Mozart operas ‘the source of inspiration…’
As he started composing, Stravinsky wrote to his publisher Ralph Hawkes asking for full scores of four Mozart operas, describing them as ‘the source of inspiration for my future opera’. While devising the scenario he and W. H. Auden went to a performance of Così fan tutte with piano accompaniment, in a school hall. Così, perhaps the most perfectly poised and balanced of Mozart’s operas, the most clear-eyed and ironic, was constantly in Stravinsky’s mind while composing.
In Stravinsky’s opera Dr. Johnson would have recognised much of the spirit of the 18th century he epitomised. Critics who rejected The Rake's Progress complained of too many features of past styles, even going so far as to call it a pastiche. This kind of criticism surfaced again when it was produced by The Australian Opera. Take it with a large grain of salt: Stravinsky invites this response. Perhaps humourless critics are afraid crafty old Stravinsky is pulling their leg.
Chester Kallman, co-author with Auden of the libretto, recalled the post-mortems after the 1951 premiere in Venice, lasting all through the night: every one of the Italian critics seized on the cabaletta of Anne’s big idea as pure pastiche, but when asked ‘which composer?’ named variously Handel, Gluck, Rossini, Weber and Verdi! Stravinsky disarmingly accused himself of a kind of kleptomania for the music of the past, but what he stole he made his own. He had been doing that since his neo-classical phase began, saying that the only music by Pergolesi he liked was his own Pulcinella, based on Pergolesi.
The Rake’s Progress is a neo-classical opera, but the musical and intellectual content is of Stravinsky’s day. Familiar classical forms organise the music, to avoid any confusion in grasping the words and the dramatic purpose.
All Stravinsky’s operatic writing opposed the Wagnerian ‘music drama’ concept. Stravinsky declared music drama and opera to be very different: ‘my life’s work is a devotion to the latter’. The nearest Stravinsky had come to opera before The Rake’s Progress was The Nightingale (1914), often closer to ballet, and Mavra (1922) a short piece in opera buffa style.
Ever since he arrived in America in 1939 Stravinsky had wanted to compose an opera in English, and by 1947 he felt that his command of a new language was sufficient for him to attempt one; he had just composed the ballet Orpheus and observed that ‘because so much of Orpheus is mimed song it seemed inevitable that my next work would be an opera’.
In May 1947 Stravinsky saw a Hogarth exhibition at the Chicago Art Institute where the ‘Rake’s Progress’ engravings immediately suggested to him a series of operatic scenes. Aldous Huxley, a frequent visitor at the Stravinsky home in Hollywood, suggested the poet W.H. Auden as a suitable librettist. Approached by Ralph Hawkes, Auden declared himself intensely interested, and came at Stravinsky’s expense to Hollywood, where the two men worked out the scenario.
Hogarth’s pictures
Hogarth’s series of eight pictures titled The Rake's Progress were issued to his subscribers in 1735, following the great success of his Harlot’s Progress. The artist had drawn a young woman destroyed by the world; now he would portray a young man obstinately bent on self-destruction. In the first picture the young man Rakewell, who has inherited a sizeable sum from his miserly father, is seen being measured for a suit, and trying to buy off a mother whose daughter he has seduced. Subsequent pictures show him surrounded by those on whom he is wasting his money: fashionable dance teachers, prize fighters, landscape gardeners, and others; he is shown, successively, at an orgy in a London tavern, rescued by the girl Sarah from arrest for debt, marrying a rich old woman with one eye, while Sarah (who has given birth to his child) tries to stop the wedding ceremony; he loses a second fortune by gambling it away; finally he languishes in Bedlam madhouse, where he is visited by the still loyal Sarah.
Tom marries a rich, old woman - fifth painting in the series A Rake's Progress by William Hogarth (1697-1764)
Hogarth’s rich panorama of 18th century London life helped these pictures confirm his fame as a satirical moralist. In W.H. Auden as librettist, Hogarth’s vision was matched by a writer whose sympathies were similar; Stravinsky said Auden was ‘one of the few moralists whose tone I can bear’. Robert Craft, Stravinsky’s live-in assistant, added that Auden was ‘a conceptualizer in quest of intellectual order, he was above all a social, moral, and spiritual diagnostician’. Auden saw Hogarth’s story as a bourgeois parable, in which ‘wine, women, song, cards, are not so much wrong in themselves as wrong because they waste money’. He felt that modern audiences would require a better moral.
They invented Nick Shadow
Auden also considered the Rakewell of the pictures almost entirely passive, which wouldn’t do for an operatic character. Auden and Stravinsky therefore began by splitting Tom Rakewell into two characters, making external action out of his inner moral conflict. They invented the character Nick Shadow, a Mephistophelean figure who appears when Tom, given three wishes, makes his first – for money. Shadow informs him of a legacy from a rich uncle: seemingly unlimited wealth.
Shadow spurs Tom on by deceiving him and promising him the life of a libertine. Nick’s identity with the Devil is clinched in the moralising epilogue, based on the ending of Don Giovanni: the characters remove their wigs and address the audience: ‘For idle hands and hearts and minds, The Devil finds a work to do…’
The sinister side of the story climaxes in the contest of wills between Nick and Tom, played out in a graveyard, the Rake’s soul wagered on a devilish game of cards.
Auden and Kallman also decided to give Tom a manic-depressive personality (‘at one moment up in the clouds, at the next down in the dumps’). Auden believed that any character who sings has to be a bit mad. By balancing Nick with Tom 18th century common sense is restored; when Shadow tricks Tom into thinking he can save mankind with his stones-into-bread machine (a dig at Enlightenment schemes for progress and reform) Nick tells the audience (the ‘men of sense’) ‘My master is a fool as you can see. But you may do good business with me’.
Nick may be Mephistopheles, but Tom has only a dash of Faust in him. Baba the Turk sums up her husband justly: ‘He’s but a shuttle-headed lad, not quite gentleman nor quite completely vanquished by the bad.’
Trulove
The love of Tom Rakewell and Anne Trulove is the central theme of the libretto. It is first stated in their duet in the countryside, in high-flown lines evoking the pastoral Golden Age. It reaches its resolution in Bedlam, where mad Tom thinks he is Adonis visited by Venus.
Anne is a considerable modification of Hogarth’s Sarah Young – she has become the embodiment of love and devotion, searching for Tom who has disappeared into the low life of London. Baba the Turk, for her part, is much more exotic than Hogarth’s rich old one-eyed wife. By marrying the famous bearded lady of St. Giles Fair, Tom is abusing freedom, trying to give up both Appetite and Reason. This is how the librettists highlight Tom’s ‘baseless motives’. Baba is arguably the most fully developed character; her eventual meeting with Anne shows her compassion and understanding, while despite her grotesque exterior, and her jealous tantrum parodying the Baroque ‘rage’ aria, she maintains her dignity. She is not merely a show business personality with a heart of gold, but truly, in her own estimate, ‘a gifted lady who never need have fear, where manner rules and wealth attends’.
Auden and Kallman, when they thought Baba up and named her, had the same feelings as Nick and Tom when they agree Tom should marry her: they laughed until they could no longer stand upright. Though The Rake's Progress is stamped all over with Stravinsky’s wit and irony, his librettists were not mere servants but true partners, and Stravinsky was delighted with their work.
At first he was surprised and annoyed when he found he was collaborating, not only with Auden, but with his sometime lover and lifelong friend Chester Kallman, whom Auden imposed on the composer as a fait accompli, assuring him that Kallman was a much better librettist than he was.
Kallman, a Jewish college student from Brooklyn when Auden first met him, introduced the Englishman to opera – Auden had previously shared the dismissive view of opera taken by many upper middle class Protestants. Auden soaked up opera, so enthusiastically that Lincoln Kirstein could tell Stravinsky ‘he adores opera: he spends half of his time playing records of Mozart and Verdi. For him opera is a ritual.’ Auden had already collaborated with Benjamin Britten on the school opera Paul Bunyan, but it was not until he worked with Kallman that he learnt to discipline his verse to follow the demands of singing, and he discovered that opera was the right place for his writing for the theatre, rather than the spoken dramas he had attempted in the 1930s (Auden and Kallman later did translations and librettos for Hans Werner Henze).
Admiration and anxiety
Auden had long admired Stravinsky’s music– as early as 1928 he owned records of Petrushka – but he was anxious about working with the composer. He had heard that Stravinsky thought that the only thing that mattered when setting words to music was the number of syllables. He feared that having so little experience of English, Stravinsky might distort the language to the point of making it unintelligible. So Auden was delighted by Stravinsky’s great respect for the language and the libretto. He asked Auden, and later Craft, to speak the text for him and mark it so that he could get all the stresses right.
This opera project had a deeper meaning for Auden, independent of his work with Stravinsky. He and Kallman had wanted for some time to write for the theatre together. Robert Craft realised that Wystan Auden’s devotion to Chester Kallman was the most important fact of the poet’s personal life, as well as the true subject of the libretto (true love is faithful). Chester had more than a touch of the faithless Rake about him. In an ironic and touching reversal of roles Auden wrote the words of Tom’s arias while Chester wrote Anne’s, later remarking that this was almost a form of penance.
Both the composer and the librettists recognised that the densest and most important part of the opera lay in Act II, including the graveyard scene and the scene in Bedlam, paralleling the classic myth of Adonis who rejects the love of Aphrodite (Venus) because he prefers freedom and the pleasures of the chase. This life of debauchery leads to his destruction, but the Goddess half redeems him, bringing him back to earth every half year. In the opera, Anne redeems Tom in the graveyard, but Shadow, losing the card game when she unexpectedly intervenes, curses Tom with madness as he descends into the grave – the curse is necessary to explain why Tom ends up in Bedlam, not for any other obvious reason.
Anne visits Tom in Bedlam and plays Venus to his Adonis, but leaves with her father, saying that it is no longer of her that Tom has need. This breaks Tom’s heart and he dies. Anne at this point seems heartless, dry, a contradiction of her persona in the opera up to then. As Joseph Kerman has observed, we want to know which way Tom goes when he dies, and the opera’s ending masks the destination of the rake’s progress. Perhaps Auden means to suggest that insanity is the ultimate human tragedy, or perhaps the inconclusive outcome reflects a modern difficulty with affirmation, leaving uncertainty. Auden’s biographer Humphrey Carpenter relates the issue to the difficulties Auden and Isherwood had finding a satisfactory ending for their plays of the 1930s. Stravinsky later said that the Epilogue’s moral was ‘too nifty’.
If this is a dramatic flaw, that’s a more serious criticism of The Rake's Progress than the common complaint that its characters are mere puppets. A morality play was what its creators intended, artificial in plot as in expression. Within this convention, the music often makes the characters deeply sympathetic. Stravinsky had never attempted any extended love music before he wrote the duets for Anne and Tom. Anne’s lullaby, Robert Craft thinks, contains the composer’s feeling about his wife Vera’s love for him.
‘…very easy to listen to…’
The straightforwardness of the Rake’s music has been a stumbling block for those who expect ‘modern’ opera to be more difficult, less obviously tuneful. Stravinsky said, ‘The music will be very easy to listen to, but making this easiness is very expensive with my time’. The voice and its melodic line predominate in Stravinsky’s opera, as in the operas he admired, by Mozart, Verdi, Italian bel canto composers, Monteverdi. Stravinsky may well have had particular voices and personalities in mind – certainly Auden and Kallman did, sending the composer records of Eleanor Steber (Anne), Ebe Stignani (Baba), Jussi Björling (Tom) and Willi Domgraf-Fassbaender (Shadow).
When there is singing, Stravinsky’s scoring is lucid and discreet, often accompanying with ostinato figures, with occasional telling solos for wind and brass instruments. The orchestral interludes and introductions, on the other hand, often create pungent and memorable sound pictures; the sounds of London, for example, coming through the window at the beginning of Act II, the gurgling to which Baba pokes her head through the curtains of her sedan chair, and the magical sounds as Shadow wheels on the stones-into-bread machine. The string quartet introducing the graveyard scene is, by contrast, searchingly polyphonic; this was the first music Stravinsky composed, and is apt for the final tying of the metaphysical threads of the plot.
Using harpsichord shows how indebted Stravinsky is to 18th century conventions, but how surprisingly he makes those conventions his own! The harpsichord in the graveyard scene goes far beyond a continuo part; it announces Shadow’s twisting of the cords around Tom’s soul, with obscure and demonic-sounding harmonies. In this scene Stravinsky joins hands with Mozart’s churchyard confrontation between Don Giovanni and the statue of the Commendatore.
The Rake’s music and libretto are both self-consciously historically aware – 20th century intellect at its most sophisticated. This sometimes mocking commentary on opera and its place in our culture comes from a composer and librettist who played large parts in forming that culture. Both are masters of ironic detachment, and virtuoso craftsmen. Their opera encapsulates rediscovered 18th century values of balance and order, with worldly wisdom, yet The Rake’s Progress is ambivalent. It stimulates, it disturbs, but offers no resolution to questions about the right path for opera, or for life.
First published in Opera Australia, 1983