My relationship with Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress began when I was around 14 years old. I was completely foxed by it. I had heard The Rite of Spring, but this was a completely different piece, and not only in the way it sounded; it was the only full-scale opera he composed. I loved many parts of it, finding them very beautiful, but there were also parts where I didn't understand what was going on. I had a strong sense that I wasn't equipped to understand The Rake.
Then somebody told me that it's the most moving opera ever written. I thought: really? That hadn't crossed my mind. But now I see they were right, that it's one of the greatest operas there is. I made an effort to understand how much there is in the music; seeing a revival of Glyndebourne's famous 1975 production, designed by David Hockney, was also crucial.
Rehearsing the piece at Covent Garden for a new production, directed by Robert Lepage, has been a real education. Although it's a work I've known intimately for a long time, I haven't actually laid hands on it before, apart from at home on the piano. It has been like peeling a flower: you realise how many layers there are in it. The heart of the piece, the bits that are the most open emotionally, are the final couple of scenes, when Tom - the Rake - is in Bedlam. That's like the inside of the flower, and all the rest of the piece is leading towards it, layer by layer.
This is the climax of Tom's "progress" - an ironic use of the word, of course, because he progresses backwards, in a way. He starts out understanding nothing about his life and simply existing in a state of unknowing bliss; he ends that way, too, but for a different reason - because he has gone mad. Along the way, he has sold his soul to Satan, alias Nick Shadow, without realising it. The story is an education in a way, about regaining an idealised state of balance, even if it comes at a terrible cost.
The most controversial aspect of Stravinsky's music for WH Auden and Chester Kallman's libretto - in my opinion the best that exists in English - is also the most superficial. It's to do with style. In 1951, when the piece was premiered in Venice, Stravinsky, then in his late 60s, must have known that it would be seen by younger modernists as a retrogressive step. After all, this is an opera with arias and recitatives, apparently set in the 18th century; its musical language is not that of the postwar avant garde, and it borrows from operatic conventions and languages from throughout music history. But all that matters only if you look at the piece in narrow stylistic terms. At that time, the 1950s, there was a greater obsession with style than there is now. Saying The Rake is not modern enough is stupid: it's like someone going around choosing things for their kitchen, saying: "That's not modern enough", or "That's too modern."
To see opera simply as a stylistic exercise, as many people do, is entirely wrong. In fact, Stravinsky developed something in The Rake's Progress he had hardly used before: a contrapuntal technique, a linear understanding of harmony that he was able to take forward into the serial, 12-tone music he wrote after The Rake. There's a clue to this change in Stravinsky's compositional direction in Auden's libretto, when Tom sings at the start of the second act: "Vary the song, O London, change!/ Disband your notes and let them range."
Lepage's production sets the piece precisely in the America where Stravinsky lived when he wrote The Rake: the America of the late 1940s and early 50s. In fact, it feels like the Hollywood of that time. I like that very much, because you are forced to look at the piece for what it is: an opera at once absolutely of its period, and yet beautifully removed from it. The piece is like a negative of its time. And yet it is a comment on America, the world, in the 1950s.
I think of it as asking the question: do we choose blissful ignorance, or do we choose power and madness? Or do we just try to get on with it and not make a mess of things? It is also an opera for a time of coming austerity, because it asks which is more important: love or money.
· The Rake's Progress, conducted by Thomas Adès and directed by Robert Lepage, opens at the Royal Opera House, London WC2 (020-7304 4000), on July 7. Thomas Adès was talking to Tom Service
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