- No eye his future can foretell
- No law his past explain
- Whom neither Passion may compel
- Nor Reason can restrain.
Igor Stravinsky - The Rake's Progress - "No Word From Tom"
Act 1 - Recitative: No Word From Tom (Anne) - Aria - Quietly, Night (Anne) - Recitative: My Father Can I Desert Him (Anne) - Cabaletta - I Go, I Go To Him (Anne)
conducted by Bernard Haitink, from 1975
Sets and costumes designed by David Hockney.
Roger Brunyate writes:
For the text, Stravinsky turned to the expatriate English poet Wystan Hugh Auden, who in turn brought in his own collaborator Chester Kallman. It was an inspired choice. As distinct from the metrical experiments of his contemporaries Eliot and Pound, Auden had always had a taste for the closed forms of earlier verse, and he adopted the Augustan style of the eighteenth century as to the manner born. Although writing in the mid-twentieth century, Auden and Kallman (whose styles are virtually impossible to tell apart) made no concessions to the modern era; their verse has the precision of Pope, whose elegance and wit they polished with the clarity of stylistic hindsight.
Although the subject and text of The Rake's Progress inhabit the eighteenth century, Stravinsky's music spans both eras; it is like a collage of classical motifs fragmented and reassembled in the manner of our own time. Indeed Stravinsky ranged even more widely in his sources. His primary inspiration is probably Mozart, specifically the Mozart of Così fan Tutte, which he had recently seen in a collegiate performance in California. But his stylistic grab-bag is deep enough to contain Monteverdi in one direction and Donizetti and Verdi in another; the styles are deliberately not all of a piece.
Furthermore, Stravinsky and his librettists conceived the opera in the old manner, as a sequence of short musical numbers linked by harpsichord-accompanied recitative. This deliberate break from the continuous musical narrative of Puccini and Strauss had the effect of taking time out of the real world and returning it entirely to the province of the composer. And it is his games with time that make the opera at once so exciting and so disturbing."
