THE RAKE’S PROGRESS

BY IGOR STRAVINSKY AND W.H. AUDEN & CHESTER KALLMAN

To preserve the intimacy of this delicate work and help the audience concentrate on the important English libretto, I set most of the action on a raked platform, a smaller stage within the stage. Scenic elements were largely in a black and white graphic style with a sparing use of color, a nod to Hogarth’s engravings that inspired the libretto without quoting the artist’s style.

I created a rustic landscape for Act I, Scene 1 to establish a marked contrast to urban London scenes that would follow. The presence of apples and rabbits on the ground evoked innocence in this Eden-like setting to which Tom Rakewell would never return. After the sculptural quality of this landscape, the London scenes were depicted on deliberately harsher and flatter surfaces. Many of the London scenes were played in front of a box-like structure that represented exterior facades, such as Tom's town house, with hinged flaps that swung open to reveal the interior. The box structure was on casters, so it could rotate to reveal another location, facilitating speedy and economical scene changes.

The large clock face suspended over Mother Goose’s brothel that marked the midnight beginning of Tom renunciation of true love and the beginning of his hedonistic lifestyle was transformed by means of a light box into the moon over Anne Truelove. This full moon with its pure light provided the single scenic element for Anne’s cavatina and aria affirming her faith in unalterable love that is one of the opera’s highlights. Another effective transformation was from the auction scene to the graveyard, where many of Tom’s useless material possessions at the sale rotated, revealing cemetery headstones on their reverse surface.

The phony machine for making bread out of stones that Nick Shadow persuades Tom to invest in, hastening his ruin, was a Rube Goldberg contraption with a mesmerizing vortex that drew Tom into the scam.