Merola Opera Performs Stravinsky’s THE RAKE’S PROGRESS
Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, which premiered in 1951, occupies a unique place in the composer’s career and, far more importantly, also in the history of opera and literature. In Stravinsky’s career, The Rake’s Progress marks the culmination and end-point of the composer’s neo-classical style. We’ll deal with that aspect of it shortly. Where literary history and opera history are concerned, Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress occupies a very problematic, and I would even say, precarious place. Making reference as it does to Mozart’s Don Giovanni as well as to Goethe’s Faust, to mention only the most important of this work’s prestigious antecedents, Stravinsky‘s The Rake’s Progress audaciously invites comparison with two of the most profound works in western culture. In spite of a libretto intelligently fashioned by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, The Rake’s Progress comes off very badly in such an exalted context. -more-
