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Stravinsky-Auden Essay
Stravinsky-Auden Essay
(To appear in Modernism and Opera, ed. Richard Begam and Matthew
Smith)
Herbert Lindenberger
I. The “Beautiful”
Interviewed on a BBC television documentary about his librettist
W. H. Auden 14 years after The Rake’s Progress was first performed,
Igor Stravinsky looked back at their joint project with the following
words: “As soon as we began to work together I discovered that we
shared the same views not only about opera, but also on the nature of
the Beautiful and the Good. Thus, our opera is indeed, and in the
highest sense, a collaboration.”1 Those who have studied the Strauss-
Hofmannsthal collaborations, or the collaborations of Verdi with his
various librettists, are more aware of tensions and differences than
they are of the solid harmony that marked Stravinsky’s work with
Auden—or, more precisely, his work with Auden and his partner
Chester Kallman, who drafted roughly half of the libretto.2
If this harmony between Stravinsky and Auden was made
possible by their agreement “on the nature of the Beautiful and the
Good,” as well as about the genre within which they were working, it is
clear that they shared both an aesthetic and an ethical framework that
might shed some light on what has now, after more than 60 years,
emerged as one of the great classic operas. I start with the aesthetic
framework guiding The Rake’s Progress. Both Stravinsky and Auden
at the time of composition could be called “neoclassicists.” Although
this designation had long been used to characterize the composer
during the over 30-year period preceding the opera, there is no
generally recognized classification of the poet, for British and American
2
cannot desert;
Though it be shunned
or be forgotten,
though it be hurt,
if love be love
it will not alter.
O should I see
My love in need,
It shall not matter,
What he may be.
Time cannot alter
A loving heart,
an ever loving heart.10
As one reads these words without the music, it is instantly clear that
Auden, recognizing the difference between libretto-style and poetry as
such, would never have written this passage as an independent poem.
Everything is exaggerated—much as it was in the Italian libretti that
Auden knew so well. Anne expresses the constancy of her love in the
traditional discourse of the many constancy arias that span the history
of opera. Who would expect anything except the most outrageous
clichés (“If love be love, / It will not alter”) from a soprano voicing the
steadfastness of her love?
Moreover, the section is carefully marked “cabaletta” in the score
(p. 120)—just as the other set pieces—duettino, trio, aria, recitative
and the like—are explicitly marked. Although the score contains a
number of arias, each in an individual style, only Anne’s aria contains
a cabaletta. It is as though the librettist and composer are telling us
that we are experiencing a cabaletta in its most essential, most
archetypal form. The monosyllabic opening, with its almost banal
vocal line (G-E-C, F-D-B) outlining two obvious chords (p. 121),
reflects at once the simplicity of the heroine and the simplicity at the
heart of any cabaletta (one remembers how the aging Verdi often
expressed his embarrassment about having to compose cabalettas for
his singers). And look at the line “It will not alter,” which Stravinsky
repeats four times with different ornamentations (pp. 122-25). (Had
the opera been composed two decades later—after the bel canto
revival had begun—one suspects that the ornamentations would have
been even more extravagant.) And although the cabaletta had
8
originally ended with a lower note, Auden, quite conscious of the need
for a cabaletta to show off a singer’s higher range, talked the
composer into a high C (p. 129). Indeed, the whole idea behind a high
C had a special meaning for Auden, who once wrote, “Every high C
accurately struck utterly demolishes the theory that we are the
irresponsible puppets of fate or chance.”11
When I first attended The Rake’s Progress about a year after its
premiere I took Anne’s cabaletta to be simply a parody of its form.
But I later came to realize that it was far more than that, for Auden
and Stravinsky were telling us many things: that the cabaletta form
and its exaggerations are central to the nature of opera; that we are
to see Anne both as silly and, through the earnestness of her
vocalizing, as utterly serious; that in the extravagance of both text and
music—here and in a multitude of other passages, for example, Baba’s
farewell aria—opera reveals itself as at once noble and foolish. Anne’s
cabaletta, one suspects, also makes a statement about the many real-
life people who choose to lead their lives in an overtly operatic way.
As I listen to it now after attending many diverse productions, I hear it
as the cabaletta to end all cabalettas. (I can think of no cabalettas in
subsequent operas, but then the convention had been dead for at least
half a century before The Rake’s Progress.)
Among the productions I have attended, none seems as
appropriate to the Auden-Stravinsky aesthetic as the one designed by
David Hockney for the Glyndebourne Festival in 1975 and
subsequently seen in several opera houses. Hockney’s sets pretend to
be engravings in the style of those that Hogarth authorized to
reproduce his paintings for A Rake’s Progress. The exaggerated cross-
hatchings that Hockney devised within each scene revisit, with an
appropriate ironic distance, the world of eighteenth-century
engraving.12 Moreover, the cross-hatching affects not only the walls
and windows, but also the curtains and many of the costumes.
Together with the words and the music performed within these
settings, the audience here experiences a neoclassical, thoroughly un-
Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk.
reduces the ancient scene to the horrors that Hephaestos’s art had
sought to disguise.
Literature, whether poetry or fiction, performs its ethical work
far more readily—or at least more discernibly—than the visual arts or
music. To be sure, certain visual artists are conspicuous for their
ability to elicit ethical responses. Many Rembrandt portraits are
notable for the power with which they awaken compassion in their
viewers, and Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893-1910), with its literal
cry for help on the part of the woman at the center—not to speak of
the figures contemplating suicide on the bridge behind her—puts to
the test the viewer’s ability to respond to the plight of others.
Yet there is one form of painting, the narrative cycle, that rivals
literary narrative in its ability to draw ethical responses from its
viewers. In the innumerable stories of the Passion told in multiple
panels in medieval and Renaissance churches, it is clear that the
Catholic church knew that it could communicate its doctrines in visual
terms with a special effectiveness to its often illiterate viewers. I bring
up the narrative cycle since Stravinsky’s opera derives not from an
earlier written text but from one of the major narrative cycles in the
history of art.
Stravinsky remembered seeing William Hogarth’s A Rake’s
Progress at the Chicago Art Institute in 1947 (Memories and
Commentaries, p. 154). Actually the year was 1946, for I myself
attended the exhibition, which closed in December of that year; indeed,
over the years I have fantasized how wonderful it might have been to
follow the composer through the show and observe him looking at
each of the eight panels to assess its operatic possibilities.
A Rake’s Progress, together with Hogarth’s other cycles, The
Harlot’s Progress (known today only through its engravings since the
paintings were destroyed in a fire) and Marriage A-la-Mode, rivals the
work of the painter’s literary colleagues Swift, Pope, and Gay in the
satirical power with which it uncovers the vices and the hypocrisy of
the society around him. And like its literary contemporaries, A Rake
seeks to awaken its consumers’ moral sensibilities. Hogarth’s Tom
Rakewell, like his operatic descendant, is pictured “progressing”
through a series of bad choices—squandering his money, dissipating,
marrying foolishly—that culminate in his relegation to Bedlam.
11
eighteenth century. But the addition of Nick Shadow and his Faustian
pact with Tom Rakewell put The Rake’s Progress squarely within an
operatic tradition that, besides those works—by Berlioz, Gounod, Boito,
and Busoni—in which Faust is specifically named, includes such Faust-
influenced tales as Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable, Offenbach’s Les
Contes d’Hoffmann, and Stravinsky’s own, generically unclassifiable
L’Histoire du soldat (1918). It is as though the process of selling one’s
soul to the devil keeps demanding operatic treatment. Still, whatever
ethical problems emerge from Marlowe’s and Goethe’s literary versions
of the story are pretty much lost in their musical embodiments, in
which the relation between devil and victim largely assumes the
characteristics of a game—and a literal card game at that in the
cemetery scene of Stravinsky’s opera.
Moreover, the two leading female characters in A Rake needed
operatic uplifting to make them more theatrically viable than they
appeared in the paintings. Thus, the lowly Sarah Young, whom Tom
has impregnated in A Rake, becomes the far classier and chaste Anne
Trulove: by raising her class status, Auden and Stravinsky were able
to portray a figure of more will than Hogarth’s pathetic figure. Yet in
both the paintings and the opera this figure is notable for the loyalty
she maintains toward her thoroughly unreliable lover. In Painting 4,
for example, Sarah appears to help Tom escape debtor’s punishment
by means of the small sum she has earned as a seamstress; and in
the Bedlam scene she weeps at his side without Tom’s showing any
awareness of her presence. And in both the paintings and in the opera
the loyal woman appears as the only positive figure within an
otherwise corrupt world.
The dumpy, middle-aged woman whom Tom takes as his wife in
A Rake is thoroughly transformed in the opera. Now she becomes the
grotesque bearded lady Baba the Turk, the thought of whom
supposedly caused Auden and Kallman to burst into uproarious
laughter together. “The quality common to all great operatic roles,”
Auden wrote soon after The Rake, “is that each of them is a passionate
and wilful [sic!] state of being” (Prose, 3: 299). Although the hero and
heroine of The Rake scarcely qualify as willful beings (except for the
cabaletta that briefly endows Anne with willfulness) Baba surely does.
Her tempers and her constant posturing represent an unbearable
13
1
Paul Griffiths, Igor Stravinsky: The Rake’s Progress (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982), p. 4.
2
For convenience’s sake, I shall refer to Auden alone as the librettist
throughout this essay. Despite Kallman’s major role in the project, it
was Auden who initially worked out the plan for The Rake’s Progress,
which he presented to the composer without mentioning his partner’s
proposed role. When Stravinsky, already in the midst of composition,
learned that Auden was not the sole librettist, he was at first miffed
but soon after accepted the arrangement. Kallman adapted himself so
comfortably to Auden’s style that readers have found it hard to
distinguish who drafted which parts. For a list of which partner was
responsible for particular passages, see ibid., p. 14.
3
W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson, rev. ed.
(London: Faber and Faber, 1991), p. 806. Subsequent references to
this edition will be noted within my text.
16
4
Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Memories and Commentaries
(Berkeley: Univ. of Calfiornia Press, 1959), p. 157. Subsequent
references to this edition will be noted within my text.
5
Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden: A Biography (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1981), p. 350. This statement, made in conversation with the
composer Nicolas Nabokov, dates from 1945, two years before he met
Stravinsky for the preparation of The Rake’s Progress libretto.
6
Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1958), p. 126. A subsequent
reference to this book will be noted within my text.
7
Reported by Robert Craft in Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship, rev.
and expanded ed. (Nashville: Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 72-73.
Another version that Craft wrote of this incident shows Stravinsky
actually breaking into tears. See
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/82dec/craft82.htm.
8
Willard Spiegelman, “The Rake’s Progress: Operatic Pastoral,” in W.
H. Auden, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), pp.
101-10.
9
See, for instance, Martha M. Hyde, “Stravinsky’s neoclassicism,” in
The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky, ed. Jonathan Cross
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), p. 135, and Jonathan
Cross, “Stravinsky’s theatres,” ibid., p. 137.
10
Igor Stravinsky, The Rake’s Progress: An Opera in 3 Acts (London:
Boosey & Hawkes, 1951), pp. 121-30. Subsequent references to the
score will be noted within my text.
11
Auden, “Some Reflections on Music and Opera,” in Auden, Prose, ed.
Edward Mendelson (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press), 3 (2008): 302.
A subsequent reference to this volume will be noted within my text.
12
For reproductions of Hockney’s set designs, together with earlier
engravings that inspired them, see The Rake’s Progress, ed. J.-M.
Vaccaro (Paris: Editions due Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique, 1990), pp. 141-56. For an analysis of this production,
see Myriam Chimènes, “Une Production de l’Opéra Glyndebourne: Les
Décors et costumes de David Hockney, la mise en scène de John Cox,”
in ibid., pp. 157-76.
13
Edward Callan, “Disenchantment with Yeats: From Singing-Master to
Ogre,” in Bloom, ed., W. H. Auden, pp. 170-71. To read “September 1,
17
1939” today one needs to look in the various anthologies that, despite
the poet’s rejection, have continued to reprint it. The poem is
available, for example, in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th ed., ed.
Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy (New York:
Norton, 2005), pp. 1474-76. This anthology also contains “Spain 1937”
(pp. 1466-68), a once-popular poem that Auden also removed from
his collected works.
14
For details on the allusions, see Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: High Art
and Low, 1732-1750 (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1992), pp.
20-35. See also Hogarth, eds. Mark Hallett and Christine Riding
(London: Tate Publishing, 2006), pp. 86-93. Subsequent references
to these books will be noted within my text.
15
Lindenberger, Situating Opera: Period, Genre, Reception
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), pp. 196-218.
16
“Introduction to A Selection from the Poems of Alfred, Lord
Tennyson,” in Auden, Prose, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press), 2 (2002): 204.
17
Letter of August 16, 1820. In The Norton Anthology of English
Literature: The Major Authors, 7th ed., ed. M. H. Abrams and Stephen
Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 2001), Volume B, p. 1857.