The Rake’s Progress at the Met review – this reheated leftover fails to excite

“It’s meant to be a spoof!” My companion, exiting the Met’s Jonathan Miller production of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress had, as is her wont, hit the nodal crux.

Rake, a brilliant comedia seria (yes, that self-contradiction is perfectly possible), is based on the famous 18th century series of eight paintings by William Hogarth, depicting the epic decline and fall of Tom Rakewell, a spendthrift inheritor of his father’s fortune, who comes to London, goes on the lam and loses it all.

Hogarth paints a hyperbolic, cautionary tale, sharpened with his customary sarcastic insight, available occasionally at The Sir John Soane Museum, Lincoln Inn’s Fields, sadly no longer a go-to neighbourhood for seeking dissolution in London.

There is still a Gin Lane, but it’s a boozer at 355 West 14th Street in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. It’s rubbish. No fun at all. A bit like the Miller opera playing uptown. The paintings fizz with fun, and if the pub and opera don’t, they both miss the point.

Stravinsky collaborated with poets W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman in the writing of Rake in 1951, twelve years into the composer’s Hollywood sojourn. The result is a masterpiece collaboration — poetry in music.

There is some fiddling with the Hogarthian original. Rakewell, “A” Rake, is elevated to “The” Rake, a distillation of all rakes. He inherits his fortune from an unknown uncle, not his father as in the Hogarths.

The character, Nick Shadow, who lures Tom from the path of rural righteousness to sin city and turns out to be a Faustian devil, is an invention. The fobbed-off-with-cash, bit-part lover in the paintings, is elevated to a pivotal character, the saintly Anne Truelove.

You can see where this is going. The hint is in the name. She’s a sort of Lizz Truss, defending her wayward Boris, no matter how many lockdown birthday cakes he scoffs.

So, what’s going on in The Rake’s Progress?

Act I

Stravinsky had seen A Rake’s Progress in 1947 in Chicago. The series of paintings struck him as narrative opera sets. To create a better storyline, the road to ruin for Tom Rakewell is opened by his great new friend, Nick Shadow.

As Tom wishes he were better placed, he speaks to his fiancée, Anne Trulove, and resolves to “live by my wits and trust to my luck.” Anne has a respectable rural dad who offers Tom a job as an accountant, to which he ripostes, “Pah!”

Shadow appears, advises Tom he is heir to a forgotten uncle’s fortune and suggests he accompanies him to London as his “manager”. Shadow knows the ropes. Tom asks how to pay him. Shadow says they will settle after a year and a day, setting up a dramatic Act III reckoning.

Anne is meant to follow on to London, but at the end of the scene, Shadow turns to the audience and confides, “The progress of a rake begins”. The opera is peppered with these occasional behind hand exchanges with the audience. We become insiders, not mere observers as in a pantomime. “Tom is a rake”. “Oh no he isn’t”. The temptation was almost irresistible. Hissssssss!

In my favourite production, Glyndebourne’s 2010 David Hockney designed, John Cox produced a jewel of a piece, Shadow was a stubbled villain in a Dracula coat, his evil intent obvious to everyone save purblind Tom. At the Met, he could have been an actuary, rubbing shoulders in a life office on Wall Street with Charles Ives, on a day off from composing.

Christian Van Horn (Shadow), a perfectly competent American bass baritone, was stolid. Strike me down, but Satan needs to be played with panache. This just wasn’t going to work.

In the next scene, we are in a brothel run by Mother Goose. Tom was not tardy on his road to ruin. He is conflicted but, inevitably, goosed.

Tom is sung by seasoned Met tenor, Ben Bliss, from Arkansas and a Lindemann scholar. He has an able voice but either was directed not to inject drama into the role or perhaps incapable of it.

In the following scene, back at the Trulove residence, we are treated to the best aria in the opera, sung by Anne, No News from Tom. It holds its own with any aria, in any opera. Anne is conflicted between duty to her father and love for Tom. She eventually rationalises that her father can look after himself, “Tom is weak” and needs her guardian angel services.

Getting there is a roller coaster of a musical ride. The words, “No news from Tom” are first sung reflectively, a Capella, on four single crotchet beats. Then, we get down to business, with fizzing strings dashing up and down the stave – Anne’s emotions. Her growing determination to rescue her love is shrilled out in brass, underpinned by swooping woodwind.

This is Stravinsky at his most cunning. Ever alluding to classical motifs in his work, he dives into Mozart, reshaping the Donna Elvira declamation aria, Mi tradi, in Act II of Don Giovanni. Not quite a rip-off, it’s more a rebuild. Like a zippy version of a much-loved classic car. An E-Type Jaguar of an aria, with brakes that work.

Golda Schultz, the South African soprano, handled the closing high “C” of No News from Tom faultlessly, one of the most definitive and challenging aria-closing notes in the repertoire.

Act II

Tom is at home, disillusioned, bored when Shadow turns up and, on the spur of the moment, suggests he marries Baba the Turk, a bearded lady, freak show celebrity – #beardedbaba.

The literary device of André Gide’s impulsive acte gratuit deployed in his 1914 Les Caves du Vatican was still au courant in 1951. And if you ever want to demonstrate your independence of spirit, acting gratuit with a femme au barbe is a pretty good way of doing it.

Anne appears at Tom’s house to find Baba in a sedan – in this case, a 1930’s car – screeching about why she is being ignored. The crowd loves Baba. Anne faces reality and leaves with dignity.

Baba was sung by Raehann Bryce-Davis, an American mezzo-soprano. Good voice. Disappointingly directed. She lacked the unhinged irrationality the character demands, and I don’t think that was down to a lack in acting ability.

The role was intentionally underplayed. When she is eventually silenced by Tom, who throws a cloth over her head she disappeared into the background. She should remain in plain view. She will be needed in the auction scene in Act III.

Shadow wheels on a Heath Robinson device that can turn stone to bread. Tom wants to feed the world – naive as ever – Shadow wants to fleece start-up investors. Bread as bitcoin.

Act III

The wheels have fallen off the bread wagon, Tom is bust and his possessions – including the shrouded Baba – are under the auctioneer’s hammer. This should be a moment of high comedy as the chorus issues ex-cathedra speculations about Tom, Baba and the weird and wonderful auction items, including a stuffed Great Auk. The action fell flat. The auctioneer lacked any sense of drama.

Baba, outraged at being offered in auction stalks out, advising a baffled Anne to seek out Tom, to save him.

Shadow has led Tom to a graveyard and demands settlement of his account. Tom must end his life by any means he chooses by the last stroke of midnight. Then, an alternative is offered, a game of cards. They will gamble for Tom’s soul instead. He must successfully name three cards Shadow will draw from a pack. Inspired by the sound of Anne’s offstage voice, he chooses The Queen of Hearts twice and wins.

But, before disappearing at dawn, Shadow condemns Tom to insanity. He had not read all the sub-clauses before pressing the “Agree” button. Tom now thinks himself to be Adonis.

The final scene of The Rake’s Progress. Insane asylum. The chorus members are fellow inmates, mocking Tom’s prospective marriage to Venus. Anne arrives to console him and for a moment they sing of Elysium. Father Truelove comes to fetch his daughter. Tom sleeps, awakens to find Anne gone and the chorus mourns Adonis.

Epilogue  

Determined to leave nothing to chance, Stravinsky and his librettist gather the characters to point out the morals of the piece. It’s another hat tip, this time to the D Major ensemble at the end of Don Giovanni, where the characters minus the Don, who is in hell, gather, face the audience and remind them, “the death of a sinner always reflects his life”.

Anne warns that we don’t all have someone like her in our life to save us. (As it happens, I do!) Baba warns that all men are mad. Tom reflects on the perils of self-delusion. Shadow mourns his role as Man’s alter ego.

In the pit was Susanna Mälkki, the Finnish conductor, ending a stint as Chief Conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra. She relished the Stravinsky and instilled a lightness of mood into the sound world that was not mirrored onstage.

This is a revival of Miller’s 1997 production, and nothing that the revival director, J. Knighten Smit, could do would ever save it from the knacker’s yard. There were six lengthy scene changes, heralded as “Brief pause” on the seat surtitles — anything but brief. Scenery groaned and creaked behind the unlit curtain interminably. Worn out as Baba’s Great Auk.

When the curtain eventually rose, there was revealed, well, …… not much scenery at all. A single lamppost. A lone house. Tom’s apartment, which should be a form of chaotic bedlam stacked with Baba’s clutter, seemed rather well arranged. Not even as bad as our London home when we downsized last year.

The Glyndebourne Cox/Hockney version, with its engaging visuals and non-stop pell-mell action, is how it should be done. “Brief pause” snuffed out any onward impetus there might have been.

In the season run-out period – Easter to June – the Met often presents “revivals”, from the leftovers section of its freezer. Some work. The Rake’s Progress did not. It’s also a useful time for trying something new, like the wildly successful Brett Dean Hamlet. On Friday Rake was 40% capacity. At the Saturday matinee Hamlet, the house was almost sold out. Bring on the new.

Or, bring back The Rake’s Progress as the spoof Stravinsky and his librettists intended. Phone Glyndebourne, the source of Hamlet, and bargain for their Hockney.