The Rake's Progress

Stravinsky became determined to write a major work in the English language, having emigrated from France to America in 1939 and settled in Hollywood, eventually taking American citizenship in 1945. The London painter William Hogarth’s celebrated A Rake’s Progress series struck him as an effective series of scenes suitable for operatic treatment. W.H. Auden, with Chester Kallman’s assistance, wrote the libretto which—at Stravinsky’s stipulation—followed the formula of “an opera of arias and recitatives, choruses and ensembles” of Purcell and his English contemporaries, as well as “the Italian-Mozartian opera”. The Rake’s Progress (1951), Stravinsky’s first full evening-length drama, was also his last major work in his now well-established neo-classical style, as previously exemplified by his Symphony in C. Stravinsky conceived a morality similar to that of The Soldier’s Tale, so the opera includes a devil, here in the form of Nick Shadow (not included in Hogarth’s pictures, but invented by Stravinsky and Auden), who misdirects and tricks the anti-hero, Tom Rakewell, into his ultimate downfall. This leads to a baleful Graveyard Scene—again, not from Hogarth, but owing something to Mozart’s Don Giovanni—in which Shadow challenges Tom to a card game to save his soul. And Tom’s beloved is not Hogarth’s city girl, but the innocent country girl Ann Trulove, who yet shows both agency and empathy in their final duet and her subsequent lullaby to the now-insane Tom in Bedlam asylum.