Music: Melody in Venice

In Venice last week, a pair of orchestra seats for the premiere of Composer Igor Stravinsky’s first full-length opera was fetching as high as $500 on the black market. Operagoers and critics came from all over Europe and the U.S. In spite of all this interest, the first-night reaction to The Rake’s Progress was one of happy surprise. The harsh and riotous Stravinsky rhythms of other years (e.g., in The Firebird, The Rite of Spring) were missing. The Rake’s Progress sang with old-fashioned melody.

Stravinsky got his idea from William Hogarth’s eight-picture series showing the rise & fall of an 18th Century man about London. He first saw the paintings four years ago, had an immediate “theatrical reaction.” Moreover, he found the paintings full of “a morality I respect.” Stravinsky decided to translate Hogarth into opera. He got distinguished help from Poet W.H. Auden and Brooklyn-born Chester Kallman, who worked up an English libretto with a Faustian theme; Poet T.S. Eliot lent a hand with the final polishing.

Off to London. Venice first-nighters could follow the plot with ease, even without much English. Young Tom Rakewell goes to London to spend his fortune with Mephistophelean Nick Shadow for a guide. For a year & a day, Shadow shows him a roaring good time with wine, women & song, then presents his bill :

‘Tis not your money but your soul . . , Look in my eyes and recognize Whom — Fool! you chose to hire.

Shadow agrees to a last card game for Tom’s life — and loses, but condemns Tom to madness. Tom’s faithful country sweetheart, Anne Trulove, tracks him down in Bedlam to say goodbye (“We shall not meet again, love, yet never think that I forget”).

Now & then, when the action seemed to call for it, Stravinsky’s music had a stringent dissonance, but most of the time it was straightforwardly lyrical. There were no ravishing melodies to leave the audience humming, but Anne Trulove’s first-act aria — lamenting departed Tom — beautifully sung by Soprano Elizabeth Schwarzkopf of the Vienna State Opera, came close to stopping the show. The other top voices: Tenor Robert Rounseville of the New York City Opera as Tom, Mezzo-Soprano Jennie Tourel as Baba the Turk, the sideshow bearded lady whom Tom marries as a jape.

Back from Noiseland. The final curtain brought an ovation, but some critical murmurs. A good many Venice operagoers, teethed on the romantic stuff of Verdi and Puccini, found Stravinsky’s music a bit flat, or too intellectual, for opera. The sets were criticized as second-rate and rather un-English, and the first-night conducting, which was handled by Stravinsky himself, as distinctly not the work of a Toscanini. But the critics agreed that The Rake’s Progress was a solid success, one of the outstanding ‘musical works of the decade, a model of form and craftsmanship.

Next stops for The Rake (in Italian, French, Flemish and German versions): Milan, Paris, Antwerp, Brussels, Cologne, D¨usseldorf. U.S. production? Stravinsky has not yet decided where or when.