The Rake's Progress | Operavision (2025)

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A machine that turns stones into bread, a bearded lady, a mental hospital and love. This is a journey down a delightfully dark spiral into the mind of a Tom Rakewell. For Tom, the combination of being lackadaisical and greedy is dangerous; and he learns the hard way. He is madly in love with the kind-hearted Anne Trulove, but there’s a hitch – her father wants Tom to have a job, but Tom feels he is not cut out for a life of drudgery! Fortunately, the diabolical Nick Shadow shows up and announces an opportune money inheritance from an obscure uncle, so Tom goes to London in search of happiness… and meets madness on the way.

Igor Stravinsky wrote The Rake’s Progress in 1951, based on eight satirical paintings by Hogarth, with W. H. Auden as his brilliant librettist-collaborator. Auden’s gift for investing verse in simple metres with rich meanings perfectly suited Stravinsky's need for variable patterns. Stravinsky shamelessly borrowed from other operas and composers. Although the work seems at first sight like a straight 18th-century pastiche, complete with secco recitative accompanied by harpsichord, it is one of Stravinsky's most complex and many-tiered scores. The influence of Mozart is obvious. The verse-and-refrain form is typical of Stravinsky's lifelong interest in ritual forms with repetition. For the story, Auden set up a pastoral idyll. Tom is Adonis, who comes to a bad end for disobeying the command of his goddess lover, Venus. Cut off from his moral roots, he falls prey to philosophies of moral nihilism - and is about to succumb when the still small voice of love brings him back to his senses, or at least to life (as the former seem pretty lost). So a mixture of antique conventions provides a frame for a strictly modern fable, just as in the music. Director Vidar Magnussen has returned Norwegian National Opera to toy with our perceptions of reality in this ‘horror show’ of a performance. He takes us inside Tom Rakewell’s head on a wild journey from riches and a life of luxury to poverty and insanity. Borrowing from the aesthetics of the 1950s and 60s, Magnussen creates a dark universe in the form of an absurd, burlesque fantasy world.

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Sneak peek at The Rake's Progress

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Meet the cast of The Rake's Progress

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STORY

Act I

Tom Rakewell is courting Anne Trulove outside her father's house in the country. Father Trulove has doubts about his daughter's proposed marriage and tries to arrange a regular job for Tom; but Tom resists the idea and, left on his own, declares his intention to ‘live by my wits and trust to my luck.’ When Tom expresses his wish for money, Nick Shadow appears and tells him that an unknown uncle has left him a substantial fortune. He then invites Tom to employ him as a servant and accompany Tom to London to sort out the inheritance.

The second scene, set in Mother Goose's brothel, shows Shadow introducing his new master to the sleazy aspects of London life. But Tom is uneasy and laments his betrayal of love, yet accepts Mother Goose's invitation to spend the night with her. Meanwhile, back in the country, Anne wonders why she has not heard from Tom. She knows somehow that he is in danger and sets out for London to help him.

Act II

Tom is bored with his dissolute life. He utters his second crucial wish, for happiness, whereupon Nick makes the odd suggestion that he demonstrate his freedom by marrying Baba the Turk, the famous bearded lady. Soon afterwards Anne finds Tom's London house, only to see him emerge together with Baba, whom he has just married. Tom tells Anne to leave, yet genuinely regrets what has happened.

In the next scene, Tom is clearly finding his eccentric marriage intolerable, as Baba is a chatterbox with a fiery temper. He silences her with medication, then falls asleep. Nick enters with a ‘fantastic Baroque Machine’ and hints that if such machines were mass-produced Tom could become a saviour of mankind and Tom sets out to market the machine, not knowing it is a sham.

Act III

The plan has failed – the act starts with the auction of the ruined Tom's property by the maniac auctioneer Sellem. The objects for sale include Baba, who has remained immobile since being silenced. When unwrapped, she resumes her tantrum, now directed at the auction-goers, but calms down when Anne enters. Baba advises her to find Tom and ‘set him right’, and warns her against Nick Shadow.

In a graveyard, Nick reveals his identity and demands payment from Tom, in the form of his soul; but as midnight strikes, Nick offers him an escape in the form of a game of cards; this section is accompanied only by harpsichord. Tom wins, thanks to the benign influence of Anne. Defeated, Nick sinks into the ground, condemning Tom to insanity as he goes. Consigned to Bedlam, Tom believes he is Adonis. Anne (‘Venus’) visits him, sings him to sleep, then quietly leaves him. When he realises she has gone, he dies.

Epilogue

Each of the principal characters gives a moral drawn from their scenes in the opera, and then come together to ascribe a final joint moral, "for idle hands, and hearts and minds, the Devil finds a work to do."

INSIGHTS

Introduction to The Rake’s Progress

An English-language opera composed in Hollywood, by a Russian immigrant, with text by a Brit and an American, that originally premiered at the Italian opera house La Fenice during the contemporary music festival in Venice in 1951 ...

In other words, it is an opera by neither Purcell nor Britten – or any other English composer – but Stravinsky. But who was Igor Stravinsky, the man behind the black sunglasses? He is recognised as one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, and in 1998, the TIME Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people of the century. He is the only classical composer to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and the only living composer to be used in Walt Disney’s Fantasia. He is said to have had a relationship with Coco Chanel and was a close friend of the artist Pablo Picasso. But what about Stravinsky’s music? Are you familiar with it?

Perhaps the ballet The Firebird? This was his first collaboration with the well-known impresario Sergei Diaghilev and his breakthrough. And how about The Rite of Spring? The Rite of Spring caused a near-riot during its premiere in Paris in 1913 because of the complicated music and shocking dance. It is said that the work changed composers’ understanding of rhythmic structure and is considered by many to mark the start of modern classical music. Puccini called it ‘the work of a madman’.

But the music in The Rake’s Progress sounds very ‘classical’ in style. A bit like Mozart, perhaps? That’s not so surprising.

Towards the end of World War I, the neoclassical style began to gain momentum in music as a reaction against late Romanticism, Expressionism and Impressionism, which dominated before the war. Many composers, including Stravinsky, asked themselves how they could possibly continue to write the same style of music now that the world had changed forever. They wanted to return to the style of the 1700s, when everything was clear and orderly and with such distinctions as symphonies, concerts and sonatas. The ballet Pulcinella from 1920, based on the music of Pergolesi, marked the start of Stravinsky’s neoclassical period.

Stravinsky’s neoclassical period was to culminate with The Rake’s Progress, in which not only the libretto was based on an 18th century work of art, but the music as well. Mozart was the main source of inspiration and Stravinsky is said to have considered himself Mozart’s successor. Instead of large orchestras, which previously characterised Stravinsky’s work, he now wrote for a small chamber orchestra that would best fit inside a traditional small theatre like La Fenice in Venice. Stravinsky also reintroduced one of the most important instruments from Baroque and classical music: the harpsichord. He wanted to combine the feeling of Mozart’s opera Così fan tutte with everything he had perfected in the 30 years that had passed since Pulcinella.

So, those who know their music history will recognise similarities to Monteverdi, Gluck, Purcell, Mozart, Rossini, Verdi and others – with a Stravinsky twist. The work is also full of references to the American music Stravinsky was introduced to since moving there, perhaps as an homage to the country that had welcomed him so openly. Stravinsky described himself as a musical kleptomaniac, who spent a lifetime stealing musical ideas and expressions he liked from Russian folk songs, jazz and the entirety of Western music history. He then reshaped it to make it his own. In doing so, he invites the listener to revisit familiar music with fresh ears.

There are extremely few opera narratives that are actually written by the composer or librettist – apart from Wagner, of course. Most operas are based on a true story, a myth, an existing play or a well-known book. Stravinsky was also inspired by an existing work, not a literary one, but a work of art, actually a series of eight paintings and engravings created by the English artist William Hogarth around the year 1733 entitled A Rake’s Progress

The images illustrate the gradual decline and fall of the lazy and immoral young heir Tom Rakewell, who squanders his inheritance from his stingy and ascetic father on partying, gambling, prostitution and luxury.

Stravinsky saw the series of paintings and engravings when they were exhibited in Chicago in 1947 and immediately felt that these images would make the perfect narrative for an English-language opera, an idea he had been mulling over since arriving in America. Stravinsky turned to the British poet W.H. Auden, who agreed to write the libretto with his American partner Chester Kallman.

The story about an ambitious youth seduced by temptation and greed is a familiar story in literature and art, perhaps best known from Goethe’s Faust. Stravinsky and Auden focus on the redemptive power of love, even though Tom’s redemption is only partial – he finds peace and love, but only in madness.

Stage director Vidar Magnussen has no doubts that The Rake’s Progress is relevant today. He believes that the libretto can very well be considered a classical theatre text. After all, the essence of the story is about Tom refusing to take the honest route to becoming a worthwhile or genuine person, and instead entrusting himself to fortune alone. And this is a theme that is very much pertinent today. We live in a world where children dream of becoming YouTube stars by attracting enough followers and assuming that everything else will simply fall into place. What will our children be like in 20 years? It is a story about how wrong things can go.

All the main characters come together in the opera’s epilogue and sing the moral of the piece: ‘Time and again, everywhere in the world, the same proverb proves to be true: For idle hearts, and hands, and minds, the Devil finds a work to do.’ Or as the director, Vidar Magnussen, puts it, ‘Find something to do with your life, or you’ll go cuckoo!’

Extracts from a text by Ragnhild Motzfeldt