The Rake's Progress: The Critic's Perception

Stravinskij’s The Rake’s Progress was performed in Venice for the first time on 11 September 1951 during the XIV Biennale of Contemporary Music. It is well known that this opera, which marked the climax and conclusion of the so-called neoclassical period, left public and critics somehow perplex so that the composer decided that time had come for him to find a new creative direction. Stravinskij’s neoclassical period in general and the Progress in particular have been widely studied and so has the composer’s collaboration with W.H. Auden for the libretto. The same cannot be said for the performance and the process of staging a genuine 18th-century melodrama in the middle of 20th century. This paper focuses on the different phases of the making of this opera, described on the basis of the documents filed with the Archivio storico delle arti contemporanee of the Venice Biennale. A detailed analysis of these documents provides a new perspective on the composer’s approach to the stage in general and to the interaction between music, voice, and the scene in particular. This work also devotes particular attention to the critical perception of The Rake’s Progress and the reactions of both public and critics. The Archivio storico delle arti contemporanee offers a full collection of reviews and critical comments that were published after the Venice première, so that we can make some hypothesis about the real impact of Stravinskij’s classical experiment on the audience of that time.