The Rake’s Progress

About

National Theatre Chorus
National Theatre Orchestra

Almost three centuries have passed since the English painter, satirist and “forefather of the cartoon” William Hogarth created a series of eight paintings (and later on engravings), tellingly titled A Rake’s Progress – the path, development, simply the life of a libertine. They capture the story of a young man who inherits an immense fortune and proceeds to squander it on luxurious living, gambling and prostitutes. It is not a trait exclusive to the 18th century that people indulging in such a lifestyle end up at a psychiatric hospital, called during Hogarth’s time (and until recently) an “asylum”.

When, in 1947, Igor Stravinsky attended an exhibition in Chicago of Hogarth’s engravings, they struck him as an ideal subject for an opera. The composer duly turned to the poet W. H. Auden, with whom, and later on with the poet Chester Kallmann, he would create the libretto. They did not adapt Hogarth’s pictures literally, yet elaborated them in a form abounding in parody and references to 18th-century opera. Stravinsky’s Neoclassical piece, premiered in 1951 in Venice, can be construed as a modern variation on the Don Juan and, to a certain degree, Faust myths. Similarly to Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Stravinsky’s Tom Rakewell raises the question of the limits and controllability of human freedom, which upon reaching a certain point transforms into its very opposite – dependence, slavery, perdition, insanity …

One would be hard pressed indeed to think of a venue more fitting for hosting The Rake’s Progress than Prague’s Estates Theatre – owing to its Classicist atmosphere providing a balance to Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism, as well as its being for ever synonymous with Mozart’s famous rake.