A Rake's Progress Through Operatic History
Still from Glyndebourne's production of The Rake's Progress
A fabulous machine that turns broken china into bread, rumors of spontaneous combustion, a bearded lady coming between two lovers, a taxidermy Great Auk, a mysterious manservant revealed to be (as sometimes happens) the devil in disguise—all culminating in a Faustian bargain thwarted by a bizarre card game in a graveyard. Even for opera, a genre that thrives on extravagance, this seems a bit much. Verdi and Wagner would recoil from these oddities and entanglements, but Igor Stravinsky and his librettists, the famous poet W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, reveled in them when they created the 1951 opera The Rake’s Progress, which is considered one of the most important operas of the second half of the twentieth century.
Based on a series of eight moralistic paintings called A Rake’s Progress (1732-1734) by the eighteenth-century English artist William Hogarth, the opera follows the young Tom Rakewell after he inherits an estate from an unknown uncle who recently died. After leaving his sweetheart, Anne Trulove, in the countryside, Rakewell travels to London to make the most of his unexpected fortune. There, newly rich and under the influence of his mysterious valet, Nick Shadow, he is swept away by the debauchery and delights of the city. Growing bored, he marries a bearded lady (as one does), later going insane and dying in Bedlam, London’s infamous madhouse. Although Auden and Stravinsky conceived the opera in the 1940s, they set The Rake’s Progress in eighteenth-century England, pushing eighteenth-century musical, poetic, and dramatic tropes to their most absurd limits.
In the libretto, Auden revels in eighteenth-century poetic figurations—for example, the personification of Fortune and invocations to Venus and Cupid—and thematic preoccupations, such as salvation, duty, social ruin, the dangers of idleness, and the contrast of the innocent country with the depraved city. Much of it is written in heroic couplets, one of the eighteenth-century’s favorite poetic forms—a form perfected by Alexander Pope—making The Rake’s Progress witty and light even in its darker moments.
Max Rudolf, Fritz Reiner, Igor Stravinsky, and George Balanchin
On top of this, Stravinsky plays up the humor of the libretto with an equally funny musical score. Stravinsky’s primary models for The Rake’s Progress are Mozart’s comic operas. Although Mozart’s operas can be rip-roaringly funny, Stravinsky takes things much further. Consider an aria early in the opera, one of the most famous arias in the whole work. After a recitative (called “Here I stand”), Stravinsky gives us Tom Rakewell’s greatest aria, “Since it is not by merit.” Tom’s swaggering resolution to venture out into the world to try his fortune is deflated by the musical accompaniment of two dawdling bassoons. If presented with the same material, Mozart would have handled the humor of Tom’s foolish aspirations in a much more dignified way. Instead, Tom’s aria descends into bathos, ending unceremoniously with the spoken, not sung, exclamation, “I wish I had money!”
This is just one example of Auden and Stravinsky’s sense of humor in the Progress: each successive scene presents a different hilarious moment, usually expertly played up in the music by Stravinsky. One of my favorite episodes in the opera occurs as Tom arrives in the city, eager to spend his newfound fortune. He finds himself in a brothel, where Auden sets two choruses, one of violent men, whom Auden calls the “Roaring Boys” and one of women (“Whores,” naturally), alternately singing about seduction and roughhousing. Auden outdoes himself here. The “Whores” sing:
In triumph glorious with trophies curious
We return victorious from Love’s campaigns.
No troops more practiced in Cupid’s tactics
By feint and ambush the day to gain.
The “Roaring Boys” respond with some of my favorite lines in the whole opera:
For what is sweeter to human nature
Than to quarrel over nothing at all,
To hear the crashing of furniture smashing
Or heads being bashed in a tavern brawl?”
W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman
With these lyrics, Auden takes this delight in debauchery and violence to an unbelievable (though incredibly funny) place. Stravinsky, in turn, sets it to music as funny as these lyrics. The music of the Roaring Boys features the trumpets and bassoons galumphing about in mock fanfare. After this, the “Whores” sing to the unromantic screeching and squawking of the violins and flutes, a humorous contrast to their talk of “victorious” love. In contrast to the peace of the pastoral country music the scene before, the music of these two choruses evokes the bustle and buffoonery of the city. It utilizes all sections of the orchestra; it is noisy, anxious, profane, highlighting both the vulgarity of the lyrics and the silliness of its subject matter.
Over the course of three hours, the audience is presented with a parade of comedic music and situations. Its nonstop comedy ends up making the Progress feel more like a parody of eighteenth-century art and culture, more a mockery of its principle models, than an homage to them. In other words, Auden and Stravinsky don’t simply imitate eighteenth-century comic tropes, but actually poke fun at the era’s nonsensical comedy. In Mozart’s operas, for example, the simplest disguise—a mustache or a different dress—is able to turn the most intimate family member into a completely unrecognizable stranger. With the right outfit, women can pass for men, men for women, servants for their masters, Italians as “exotic” Albanians. Of course, this credulity is not realistic. Auden takes this gullibility to its extremes, allowing Rakewell to believe in the machine that turns broken china into bread, and to believe that only by coupling with the ugliest woman in London will he truly be happy. The bearded woman, her curio collection, and her sudden transformation into a statue when a wig is thrown on top of her all seem to be a natural, though absurd, extension of the world of eighteenth-century opera, where all disguises are foolproof, statues come to life, women are constantly abducted, and people launch themselves out of second story windows. The zany little absurdities of the Progress clearly mimic these eighteenth-century operatic absurdities, and by taking them a step further, Auden and Stravinsky draw attention to the ridiculousness in these “ordinary” eighteenth-century operatic clichés. Watching the opera, one senses Auden and Stravinsky’s playfulness and perceives that they are enjoying themselves, often, as it appears, at Mozart’s expense.
Privately however, Auden and Stravinsky loved the art of the eighteenth century, which complicates the parodic nature of the Progress. Stravinsky adored the music of Mozart, particularly the larger scale vocal pieces, such as the larger masses, and, of course, the great operas. Auden also held these pieces in high regard, and for his own part, the poetry of Alexander Pope, whose ever-present wit clearly influenced the Progress. Pope was a lifelong love of his, and one of the only poets he continued to read towards the end of his life. The opera might feel parodistic in many ways, but when one considers the way its creators felt towards the pieces that inspired it, one has to allow that it is at least partially a loving tribute to these works. In fact, before beginning work on the opera, Stravinsky ordered the scores of several of Mozart’s complete operas for private study, and was later always upfront about their influence on the Progress.
Any listener who delights in the operas of Mozart and the poetry of Pope is sure to find enjoyment in The Rake’s Progress, not only because it features many of the same tropes and plot points—disguise and mistaken identity, the pomp of fans and footmen, powdered wigs and corsetry—but also because it rewards Pope and Mozart’s most ardent fans and diligent students, who will notice even the subtlest ways Stravinsky and Auden turn these great artists on their heads.
Photograph from Wilton Music Hall’s Production of Rakes Progress
Toeing the line between sincere homage and raucous parody, The Rake’s Progress is a complex piece, one that evinces sincere ambivalence toward its source material, but above all, delight. In thinking about other works of art similarly created as “loving parodies” of their models, my favorite example is the 1996 horror movie Scream. In this work, as in The Rake’s Progress, the writers took a look at their source material (in this case the great 1980s slasher films, such as Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th, and many of their unfortunate direct-to-video sequels) and created a film that acknowledges and mocks those tropes. Both acknowledge the strong and the weak aspects of the art that preceded and inspired them, demonstrating that the greatest parodies, perhaps paradoxically, are the ones which know and love their source material best. Mockery, The Rake’s Progress reminds us, can be the sincerest form of flattery.
Jacob Martin is a freelance oboist and English hornist in the Cincinnati area. He regularly plays with orchestras in Columbus, Dayton, Evansville, Owensboro and Anderson.