Stravinsky and The Rakes Progress – an opera written by a man who hated opera

Igor Stravinsky is the only composer to have ever been arrested for possession of a dominant seventh chord. Luckily, Stravinsky had the foresight not to return to the Soviet Union from Switzerland in 1920, four years before it morphed into Stalin’s charnel house for non-compliant artists. Instead, this event happened in the land of the free and the brave. In Boston, no less, but this incident was no tea party. It was 1944, and Igor had the temerity to brandish the dominant seventh chord in a concert performance of his arrangement “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

To the Boston police, this was a crime, the only mitigating circumstance that it was hardly a concealed weapon as none of Stravinsky’s diminished sevenths were ever concealed. Massachusetts’ law forbade “any re-arrangement of the national anthem in whole or in part” or face a fine of $100. In this case, the men in blue removed the offending articles from the music stands.

What was going on? The catchy, lightweight march had been adopted as the national anthem only as recently as 1931, it was hardly historically sacrosanct. Was it being desecrated nightly in Boston-Irish speakeasies? Were harbour lightermen parodying it along the waterfront in cheery tenor haloos? Was Joe Kennedy’s cheap hooch intoxicating usually loyal but prohibition-busting citizens to the point of revolutionary disrespect? No, the possibly greatest living composer of the 20th century had tweaked a chord progression or two.

It all goes to show how our era holds no monopoly on batty politicians bent on banning anything to secure a headline or drum up a Twitterstorm. Poor Stravinsky. The myth grew he had been locked up for several days. There remains in circulation a traditional custody mugshot of prisoner 5474 (a defiant Igor) taken on 15th April 1940; hang on, that’s four years earlier.

A Boston captain indeed warned him after complaints from the audience, who found his dissonance offensive, but that’s it. The mugshot is from an earlier visa application. Please take a look at it and be amazed that they let him in. Some versions were photoshopped, or whatever the equivalent was back then in 1944.

On the fiftieth anniversary of Stravinsky’s death, Once at a Border, a 1982 ground-breaking documentary on the composer’s life by film director Tony Palmer, has been re-released. Palmer is the genie of the music biopic lamp, with over one hundred film documentaries ranging from The Beatles to Stravinsky on his scorecard; all are masterful. Once at a Border is arguably the summit of his career. In two hours, forty-seven minutes, viewers are plunged into Stravinsky’s life. The cast of interviewees is stellar – Madame Vera Stravinsky (his second wife), Nadia Boulanger, Jean Cocteau, Kyra Najinsky and Marie Rambert, along with reams of atmospheric archive footage never seen before.

Palmer’s early 80’s timing was perfect. Sufficient of Stravinsky’s contemporaries were still alive to breathe life into the otherwise necessarily archival retrospective. It is hardly Sergei Diaghilev’s fault that the driving force behind Stravinsky’s early ballet compositions and in and out of favour friend – he diddled Stravinsky out of royalties – had the bad manners to die in 1929, making himself unavailable for the camera. Good job there were others who lived on to tell their side of the story. 

A remarkable impression left by the documentary and clips from contemporary newsreels is how popular, important and controversial composers could be in the first half of the twentieth century.

Stravinsky’s odyssey, living in Russia between 1901 and 1914, moving to Switzerland between 1914 and 1920 (because of his wife, Katya Nosenko’s tuberculosis) and then onto France between 1920 – 1939 (because Soviet Russia, then Stalin would have Gulagged him). Stravinsky then found his feet in America between 1939 – 1971 where he was greeted, welcomed and even mobbed at certain ceremonies. It turns out that Stravinskymania predated Beatlemania by around half a century. He eventually and poignantly returned to Russia in 1962.

Today’s classical composers don’t register in the public consciousness to the same extent. Would hordes greet American great John Adams at Le Bourget if he migrated to France tomorrow? John Cage mainly conducted his Saturday trips to the LA shopping mall untroubled. Perhaps the rarefication of classical music in the latter half of the twentieth century and the first two decades of the 21st has marginalised its composers in the popular public mind. Today’s idols come from elsewhere. 

Stravinsky sensationally launched his early career with a slew of controversial ballets – The Firebird, Petruska, The Rite of Spring, in a fruitful but financially fraught collaboration with Sergei Diaghilev, founder of Ballets Russes, but he flopped with his first opera, The Nightingale in 1914. The Rake’s Progress, 1947, is Stravinsky’s only full-scale opera regularly given outings today. Stravinsky was uncomfortable with the medium. 

Once at a Border has unearthed a letter from Stravinsky revealing his private disdain for opera. His other quasi-operatic works – The Nightingale, Persephone, Oedipus Rex, Mavra, and The Flood – were more like musical theatre.

In this 50th anniversary, performances of The Rake’s Progress are breaking out like Covid. Many variants; Glyndebourne, The Met, Welsh National Opera, Rome Opera and OperaGlass Works, are just samples.

Are they worth risking an encounter? In one sense, the opera is typical Stravinsky, drawing on a ragbag of cultural references and based on a whim, after he was impressed by William Hogarth’s famous eight-painting series of paintings and engravings, A Rake’s Progress, at a 1947 Chicago art show. 

Mozartian influence – The Marriage of Figaro – is evident. And what’s this creeping in, Handel, Verdi, Schubert? They all were formative for Stravinsky, and he was happy to tip his cap. There are threads of Russian folk themes throughout the performance. Most noticeable is what is missing. The clashing dissonances and brutal atavism of The Rite of Spring that shocked the Paris beau monde of 1913 are superseded by melodic line.

There is a stand-out 2017 production from Aix Festival available below:

The Orchestre de Paris is conducted by Eivind Gullberg Jensen. The production is staged by English director Simon McBurney, who founded Théâtre de Complicité in London. He ranges from opera to film. Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation is one of his. Anyone who can make Tom Cruise appear tall is a capable illusionist, and there are plenty of illusions in his gripping version of Progress.

The story focuses on Tom Rakewell, young and penniless, in love with Ann Trulove. The father says no to the union and Tom leaves for London to encounter an enigmatic smoothie called Nick Shadow – really Satan – and unexpectedly inherits a large fortune. Shadow leads him on a life of opulence and debauchery — the old Faustian ploy. 

However, when Tom – a bit of a gormless twit – discovers money can’t buy him love, it is already too late, and his escapades gradually drive him insane. 

Marrying Baba the Turk, a bearded lady, just because she is à la mode, will not end well. Eventually, he and Ann are reconciled, but Tom dies, regretting his folly. At bottom, it is an everyday story of influencers gone bad.

The set design is minimal and brilliant. It consists of an open white box upon which changing dynamic scenes are projected. The walls are made of paper, and items of the set burst through walls and ceiling from time to time, breaking the surfaces as required. Characters hack their entrances and exits. Mr McBurney, masterfully restrained, prevents the chaos descending to rom-com levels of banality. 

Overall, the effect is to draw the audience into Tom Rakewell’s increasingly deranged view of the world, to the point that there are moments when even marrying the bearded Baba seems like a plausible strategy. My only real gripe was that Ann Truelove was too mimsy. Her attempts to draw Tom back from the cliff edge of insanity were half-hearted. Indeed that, coupled with the prospect of returning to the disapproving flat-capped father, was more calculated to make Tom jump. 

Benjamin Britten’s comment on hearing The Rakes Progress for the first time was the catty, “I liked the opera very much. Everything but the music.” The irony is that dropping in on Progress incognito; one could easily mistake it as an opera of Britten’s own. It has the feel of The Turn of the Screw. Further to the catty point, Stravinsky could give as good as he got. “Why is it that when I hear a piece of music I don’t like, it’s always by Villa-Lobos?” And, on the note-proliferating Olivier Messiaen, “All you need to write like him is a large bottle of ink.” 

Stravinsky’s musical roots were firmly planted in the 19th century; he helped drive the modernist movement of the early 20th and successfully adopted Hollywood musical idiom towards the end of his life. While other composers were comfortable in their niches, Stravinsky reached across a globe of musical styles, in lockstep with his nomadic life. Once on a Border is a masterful summation of that life, The Rake’s Progress it’s ultimate destination.