From the Dramaturg’s Desk: A Deep Dive into THE RAKE’S PROGRESS

Looking Back to Move Forward: The Rake’s Progress by Kelley Rourke

“Can a composer re-use the past and at the same time move in a forward direction? Regardless of the answer (which is ‘yes’), this academic question did not trouble me during the composition, nor will I argue it now, though the supposed backward step of The Rake has taken on a radically forward-looking complexion when I have compared it with some more recent progressive operas.” (Igor Stravinsky, 1964)

Stravinsky had been casting about for a subject for a full-length English opera for several years when he happened on an exhibit of William Hogarth’s series, The Rake’s Progress, at the Chicago Art Institute in 1947. Aldous Huxley suggested W.H. Auden as a librettist, and the two men quickly found a shared sensibility. “Wystan had a genius for operatic words,” said Stravinsky later. “His lines were always the right length for singing and his words were the right ones to sustain musical emphasis… as soon as we began to work together I discovered that we shared the same views not only about opera but also on the nature of the Beautiful and the Good.”

The story portrayed in Hogarth’s series was only the starting point for the opera’s plot, which soon took on a life of its own. Just as Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine quickly realized that the painting that inspired Sunday in the Park with George lacked a pivotal character in the drama (the painter), Stravinsky and Auden (who was later joined by Chester Kallman as co-librettist) made an important addition to Hogarth’s cast of characters: Nick Shadow, a Mephistophelean figure who appears to grant the title character’s impulsive wishes — and to demand the ultimate price.

Stravinsky knew from the beginning what kind of opera he wanted to make: “Bear in mind that I will compose not a Musical Drama, but an Opera with definitely separated numbers,” he told Auden. The composer asked his publisher to send him several Mozart scores to study: The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, and The Magic Flute. 

Joseph Colaneri, who conducts the Glimmerglass production, sees the fruits of Stravinsky’s exploration throughout the piece. “Stravinsky uses the same orchestra as The Marriage of Figaro. It’s an orchestral color that we’ve heard before, but harmonically, Stravinsky says, no, no, this is new, come with me, come into 1951.” While Stravinsky’s language is tonal — there is always a sense of “home” — he freely employs dissonance, straying from the home key just as Tom strays from his own essential nature.

Stravinsky also makes use of Mozart’s structures: “For instance, for Anne Trulove’s big scene, Stravinsky took a typical 18th-century form,” says Colaneri. “You have a little scena that starts with an orchestrated recitative, then a cavatina — a slow, reflective piece — then a tempo di mezzo to bridge, and then you’re in the cabaletta — a fast, brilliant piece of music that is dramatically juxtaposed to the cavatina. Stravinsky takes the style of Mozart and views it through a modern lens — like taking an 18th-century painting and looking at it through a filter. By taking what is past and reinterpreting it for the present, we keep the tradition alive.”

The Glimmerglass production adds another interpretive layer by moving the story forward to the period of the opera’s composition — now three-quarters of a century in the past. “The opera takes place in specific locations that we have abstracted into iconic shapes and colors, referencing the color field painters of that time — people like Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly,” says designer John Conklin. “We were also inspired by the panache of Saul Bass’s film title sequences.”

While the overall visual world has moved forward in time, director Eric Sean Fogel plans to use several of Hogarth’s tableaux as a starting place for staging and choreography. Costume designer Lynly Saunders has worked to strike a balance between “1950s silhouettes, which can evoke a certain wholesome innocence, and the danger that all the characters find themselves in as they navigate Nick Shadow’s London.” 

When the opera opens, Anne and Tom are reading poetry to each other in an Arcadian landscape. “I like to think they are reading Alexander Pope,” muses Conklin. In the same way that Stravinsky’s score references the musical forms of an earlier age, Auden’s verse makes a nod at Enlightenment poetry — its form, its diction, its ideas. The opera’s opening duet seems to pick up the thread from Pope’s Essay on Criticism:

Unerring Nature, still divinely bright

One clear, unchang’d, and Universal Light,

Life, Force, and Beauty, must to all impart,

At once the Source, and End, and Test of Art.

Conklin continues: “Anne and Tom see their lives unfolding in an Arcadian dream. This is the world they imagine they want. Even before Shadow appears, it is Trulove who turns Tom’s thoughts to money, who sets him up for Shadow’s infernal intervention. The moment Trulove sends Anne inside, the men begin to talk of money, which ultimately leads Tom to abandon Anne and Arcadia, this place where Venus rules.”

Tom unwittingly summons Shadow when he utters the first of three impulsive wishes: “I wish I had money.” Shadow appears with news of a surprise inheritance, which serves as a pretext for whisking Tom off to London. “I see Tom as a would-be artist who gets seduced by a big city,” says Fogel. “I think a lot of artists can identify with this journey. You get to the city and people want to distract you, to take advantage of you. Part of the artist’s journey of growing up is learning how to navigate life and temptations. In our version, Shadow is like the slick commercial impresario, the experienced professional who wants to take advantage of Tom’s naivete.” 

When the vices of the city prove hollow, Tom utters his second wish: “I wish I were happy.” Shadow counsels that he can know happiness if he frees himself from ordinary appetites and marries Baba, a “freak” on display at St. Giles Fair. “Baba is a performer,” says Fogel. “She is the most commercial version of an artist, but also the most flippant and fun. She’s a Kardashian, a ‘Real Housewife,’ a freak. She’s famous for being famous.”

Adds Conklin, “The world of our production is also influenced by the visual language of advertising and celebrities of the 1950s, when the two biggest celebrities were Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. Marilyn, for all her beauty, was considered freakish — too famous, too sexy, too much herself. Elvis is the same way. Both of them, in their way, were referred to as freaks, which is also how Baba is advertised.”

Shadow, the impresario, succeeds in pulling Tom along because he has all the tools and tricks to create a dazzling scenario, but none of them satisfy for long. As Auden put it, “Our Tom Rakewell is a man to whom the anticipation of experience is always exciting and its realization in actual fact is always disappointing; temperamentally, therefore, he is a manic-depressive, elated by the prospect of the future and then disgusted by the remembrance of the recent past.”

Tom’s final wish — for the materialization of a machine that can vanish “toil, hunger, poverty and grief” — would seem to point at some moral progress. But as with his first two wishes, Tom seeks reward without effort. This lines up neatly with the final words of the epilogue, which posits idleness as the condition that lets the Devil in. 

Like Faust, Tom has made a deal with the Devil, but it’s a Faust story with a difference, which Conklin finds intriguing: “Not only does Tom not go to hell, but he is saved twice.” A year and a day from Shadow’s first appearance, he demands his payment — Tom’s soul and life. “But then Shadow gives Tom a reprieve with the card game. And then, thanks to Anne’s intervention, Tom wins the game. In no other Faust story does anything like this happen, as far as I know.”

Tom keeps his life, but Shadow condemns him to insanity. Is madness a win, or a loss? “When Shadow says, ‘Be thou insane,’ Tom is reconnected with what might be his true persona, the artist, Adonis,” muses Conklin. “He began the journey as a kid reading poetry, a potential artist, like every child. Shadow cuts off that imagination, giving Tom an ‘easy’ path to indulge his impulses. But now Tom completes the circle, coming back to his imagination, and is perceived as being insane. When Anne visits, Tom invites her to rejoin him in Arcadia — to accept the role of Venus — but she will not. Tom has found his way back to the world that filled his mind at the opera’s opening, and he calls out to Eurydice, Orpheus, Persephone — and finally to his Venus, who refuses him. You could say that Tom dies, in a way, of reality — of Anne deciding to choose a ‘reality’ that is other than Arcadia. It is the ultimate betrayal, a death of dreams.”

Is the epilogue, with its sturdily conventional work ethic, to be believed? Shall we “weep for Adonis,” or for ourselves? Toward what end are we “progressing”? What is the nature of the Beautiful and the Good? Is it to be found in some past “Age of Gold” or in that which is yet to be?

The progress of Stravinsky’s own career was confounding for some critics, who were disappointed when the man who had penned the revolutionary Rite of Spring took a new/old path. Stravinsky, for his part, was annoyed at efforts to categorize his writing. “Neoclassicism? A label that means nothing whatsoever,” he said in a 1949 interview for the Houston Post. “I will show you where to put it” — and he gave his derrière a firm pat.

Can a composer re-use the past and at the same time move in a forward direction? Thirteen years after the premiere of The Rake’s Progress, Stravinsky had heard his share of opining about the ways he employed 18th-century materials and devices in service of his own goals. “I ask the listener to suspend the question as I did while composing, and, difficult as the request may be, to try to discover the opera’s own qualities,” he wrote. “For a long time The Rake seemed to have been created for no other purpose than journalistic debates concerning: (a) the historical validity of the approach; and (b) the question of pastiche. If the opera contains imitation, however — especially of Mozart, as has been said — I will gladly allow the charge if I may thereby release people from the argument and bring them to the music.”