PROGRESS OF "THE RAKE"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 804, 17 December 1954, Page 17

PROGRESS OF "THE RAKE"

HE RAKE’S PROGRESS, the first full-length opera by the septuagenarian composer Igor Stravinsky, will be given its premiere in New Zealand on December 26 with a YC link broadcast. The performance will be from a recording by the chorus and orchestra of the Metropolitan Association, conducted by the composer, with a distinguished cast that includes Hilda Gueden as Anne Truelove, Blanche Thebom as Baba the Turk, Eugene Conley as Tom Rakewell, Mack Harrell as Nick Shadow, and Martha Lipton as Mother Goose, Given its original performance at the Venice Festival in 1951, the progress of The Rake has been a triumphant one. Hearing the opera, you will understand why. This is music of and for the theatre. Stravinsky, seemingly, has finished with adventurous experiments; unless you are prepared to take a return to the formalism of the 18th Century as an adventure, and maybe even an experiment. It is possible you may be astonished; it is certain you will be surprised. For this is not the Stravinsky of the brilliant and colourful Petrouchka, nor of the sophisticated primitivism of The Rite of Spring, the controversy made classic by Walt Disney. In The Rake’s Progress, "without intending to model our opera on any particular example we agreed nevertheless," says the composer, "that it should be of the type of Mozart-Italian opera we both most admired." Stravinsky’s librettist is the poet W. H. Auden, who worked in collaboration with the young American, Chester Kallman. It has long been an aspiration of Auden’s to associate poetry with music on the large scale the theatre offers. Stravinsky presented the perfect fulfilment. Although this was Stravinsky’s first setting of English in a major work, the m@sic fits the words like a glove. It has the characteristic lucidity that one expects of Stravinsky. Every effect has been carefully calculated and _ skilfully brought off. It comes out as vividly in the recording. "No composer can fail to ‘be delighted with the possibilities microphones offer him,’ says Stravinsky, "not for experimenting with collations of noise, but for the balanced acoustical reproduction of his music." The recording technicians have done well by Stravinsky. The 18th Century atmosphere is not to be found, of course, in a pastiche of Mozartean harmonies, although the composer has patterned the texture of the music to the form. It is in the formal style that The Rake’s Progress is reminiscent of the old Italian opera, in the shape of the recitative and, more particularly, in an ingenious use of the old aria da capo. The ABA form of the classical aria is not given as a stylistic repetition of the first part, but is incorporated into the movement of the plot. The result is simplicity itself, an even flow of music and drama that does not embroil the mind in any intellectualities but leaves the ear free to follow the excitement of the story. The Rake’s Progress was inspired by the famous series of pictures by Hogarth. But there the resemblance ends. For a reproduction of Hogarth’s earthy realism one must go to Dame Ninette de Valois’s Sadler’s Wells ballet on the subject. In the Stravinsky-Auden settings, the whores, the roaring boys, the citizens and madmen are a backdrop, as it were, for the idyllic love of

Anne ‘Truelove for Tom Rakewell. Hogarth’s characters could never become genteel; but in the opera, elegance triumphs over bawdiness. The story concerns the adventures of Tom Rakewell, impecunious suitor of Anne Truelove. Tom has a disinclination for work, which neither Anne’s love nor her father’s offer of a job can affect. Tom, however, needs money, and the situation for him seems to be saved by the arrival of one Nick Shadow, who annoufices that an unknown uncle of Tom’s has remembered him in his will. Accompanied by Shadow, Tom hies off to London to enjoy his inheritance. The gay life of London suits Tom down to the ground, and encouraged by Nick, he rapidly slides down the path of sensual pleasure; arriving finally at Mother Goose’s brothel to enjoy the lowest of high jinks. Divided between remorse and his insatiable appetites, Rakewell eventually reaches St. Giles’s Fair, where -he is persuaded to marry the veiled Eastern freak, Baba the Turk. Too late, Tom lifts the veil to discover that Baba’s chief claim to beauty is a flowing black beard, and worse, that through it pours a continual insensate chatter. There is nothing for it but to dump her, which Tom does by the expedient of crowning her with a tea cosy, in which state we discover her again in the next scene, when all Tom’s possessions, including Baba, are being sold up. Nick Shadow now discloses that he is none other than Death, which we might well have suspected all along. He tosses for Tom’s soul. Tom wins but is condemned to the madhouse of Bedlam. Here, in his madness he believes he is Adonis and Anne, who has always loved him, Venus, when she visits him. At last he realises happiness. But too late. When he awakes from the sleep into which Anne has soothed him, he finds her gone. And this being opera, he dies mourning. The Rake’s Progress is described as a fable and portrayed as a comedy, but tragedy has an unhappy habit of poking in its unpleasant head. In the end the opera turns out to be a morality play. The characters come forward to the footlights and announce the moral: "Death will always find work for idle hands." Which, after all, is as good a moral as any for the Boxing Day holiday. 5