Not Every Rake Is Rescued

POOR TOM RAKEWELL! He’s a lazy fellow looking for easy money, trying to hang onto his fiancée Anne Trulove even as her father disparages his indolence. He makes a wish; the wish comes true. He has fallen into a fortune. And fallen is the word: The fortune comes with devilish strings attached. 

Adrian Kramer as Tom Rakewell, Marc 
Webster as Trulove, and Lydia Grindatto 
as Anne Trulove. Photo credit: Kayleen 
Bertrand/The Glimmerglass Festival

The Glimmerglass Festival debuted its first-ever production of Stravinsky’s only opera, and it’s a knockout. Adrian Kramer is a Tom who manages to be endearing in spite of his obvious self-involvement; Lydia Grindatto beautifully sings the rather thankless role of Anne, the role having been here written more as a 1950s TV wife than a 1730s bawd. But it’s Aleksey Bogdanov, as the evil, delightful Nick Shadow who steals the show. He almost can’t help it: villainous baritones usually are the most charismatic of the cast, but Bogdanov brings an extra dimension of vocal agility to his performance, to my ears edging out the Shadows I grew up hearing on recordings (viz., Mack Harrell, John Reardon, and Samuel Ramey).

William Hogarth’s series of eight paintings known collectively as “The Rake’s Progress” were completed in 1734 and immediately followed by a series he made of nearly identical engravings, the better for public distribution. It’s essentially an eight-panel cartoon strip, each panel advancing the plot of the decline of Tom Rakewell (as he was named in the series) alongside busy visual commentary driving home the attendant moral message. Eighteenth-century England reveled in misbehaving and then regretting such behavior; Hogarth’s satiric paintings thus were greatly popular.

Igor Stravinsky saw the paintings during a Chicago exhibition in 1947, inspiring him to create his only full-length opera. The libretto, by poets W.H. Auden & Chester Kallman, adds a Faustian dimension to Rakewell’s decline and fall by inventing the Satanic emissary, inevitably named Nick, and the pathway he promises to fortune will cost hapless Tom his soul. 

Contemplating an opera by Stravinsky will impel you to ask: which Stravinsky?, noting that the composer tended to reinvent himself along the course of his career. Appropriately to the Hogarthian inspiration, this piece dates to the composer’s neoclassical period, which began in 1920 with his Octet for Winds, written in classic sonata form, and included the counterpoint-laden Symphony of Psalms and the jazzy-yet-classical Ebony Concerto.

The ensemble in The Rake's Progress.
Photo credit: Kayleen Bertrand/
The Glimmerglass Festival

It was Aldous Huxley who recommended that Stravinsky choose Auden to write the libretto for the piece he had in mind, which was fine with the opera-loving Auden. He set to work sketching out the composer’s ideas, and soon brought his partner Chester Kallman into the project, as Kallman proved to have a keener sense of stage-workings. 

Tom is the lazy heir to a considerable fortune. In the Hogarth series, it’s Tom’s father who has bequeathed the legacy; in the opera, the devious Shadow appears with the news that an uncle has died and named Tom his heir. 

It’s fortunate news: Tom wants to marry Anne Trulove (the name is an Auden-Kallman invention) but her father has been insisting that the young man at least be industrious: “She may take a poor husband, if she choose. / But I am resolved / she shall never marry a lazy one.” Thus the sudden (fabricated) legacy is just what Tom needs to impress the dad and wed the daughter. 

Stravinsky envisioned the opera as a Mozartean parade of arias, ensemble pieces, and recitatives, or so he told Auden and Kallman. When he embarked on setting their text, however, he played much more freely with it. The poets adopted the 18th-century style of Augustan verse, which championed classical forms but gave them more self-directed voices – epitomized by the poetry of Alexander Pope. Against these very rhythmic verse forms, Stravinsky often set contradictory rhythms, even while exhorting his singers to pay more attention to the conversational aspect of the words.

This is excellently accomplished by the Glimmerglass cast. It’s evident near the start. Lulled by the classical-era politeness of the first duet, your ear will find the onset of Tom’s aria, “Since it is not by merit” somewhat off-kilter. That’s the point. Once you’re used to it, this extra-dimensionality of the opera opens up to you, and we can thank leads Kramer, Grindatto, and Bogdanov for their vocal versatility, along with the rest of the cast and chorus, here directed and choreographed by Eric Sean Fogel.

Adrian Kramer as Tom Rakewell and 
Aleksey Bogdanov as Nick Shadow. 
Photo credit: Brent DeLanoy/
The Glimmerglass Festival

It’s Fogel’s directorial debut at the Festival, though hardly his debut. He choreographed some of my favorite productions there in recent years, including “Show Boat,” The Cunning Little Vixen,” “Porgy and Bess,” and “Candide,” and he already sneaked in as co-director of some recent shows. He’s clearly well-suited to perform both those jobs. 

Tom’s saga begins at Anne’s house, where he stands on a modest sloping platform that’s known in the trade as a rake. Keep an eye on it – it progresses through the show. And if that’s not punning enough, Act Two begins with a projection on the scrim of an eye, the image growing larger until it’s only iris and pupil – at which point it’s enveloped with blackness, known to the movie world as an iris out. 

The ensuing journey takes Tom from brothel to Bedlam, which begins with a delightful chorus of prostitutes and rakehells, unashamedly boasting of their exploits. As the strumpets declare, “With darting glances and bold advances / we open fire on young and old. / Surprised by rapture, / their hearts are captured, / and into our laps they pour their gold.” Tom is taken up by the madam, Mother Goose (an ebullient Tzytle Steinman), who soon decides to take him for herself. “Sweet dreams, my master,” sings Nick. “Dreams may lie, but dream. / For when you wake, you die.”

Anne is forgotten, but this neglect allows her to venture one of the high points of score, the recitative and aria “No word from Tom,” which Grindatto gorgeously rendered. Tom instead marries the grotesque Baba the Turk (Deborah Nansteel), a circus bearded lady who never shuts up, as we learn from an aria that begins, “As I was saying / both brothers wore moustaches, / but Sir John was taller.” Nansteel more than did it justice, while wearing a beard, no less.

Adrian Kramer as Tom Rakewell (front) and
Tzytle Steinman as Mother Goose (back) 
with members of the ensemble. 
Photo credit: Kayleen Bertrand/
The Glimmerglass Festival

At the outset of Act Three, Tom’s foolhardy get-rich-quick schemes have failed and he has gone bust. The auctioneer Sellem enters to sell whatever Tom still owns, giving Kellan Dunlap a well-sung appearance in that role. It leads to a duet for Baba and Anne (“You love him, seek to set him right”), which draws in Sellem and the others for a complicated ensemble piece showing Stravinsky at his best.
    
Shadow’s terms of hire are to work for Tom for a year and a day, after which he reveals the price of this employment: Tom’s soul. This scene takes place in a graveyard where a plot awaits – but Tom talks Nick into changing the stakes. They’ll gamble for his soul, with a deck of cards. (It’s a return for Stravinsky to the notion of his 1937 ballet “Jeu de cartes,” which, as if its neo-classical notions weren’t clear enough, has a romp with Rossini’s “Barber of Seville” overture in the ballet’s “third deal.”)

Guess who cheats? Ah, but Anne is on hand to reveal Shadow’s perfidy. In the ensuing battle of wits, Nick declares that Tom will lose what’s left of his, and we end in Bedlam where, according to the already-resident madmen: “Banker, beggar, whore, and wit / in a common darkness sit.” An unhappy ending? There’s some ambiguity in the opera’s funny final moments, so I’ll leave it to you to see it and work it out for yourself.

The creative team of the designers of sets (John Conklin), costumes (Lynly Saunders), lighting (Robert Wierzel), and projections (Greg Emetaz) must have had a ball creating this out-of-time yet somehow integral world, nicely capturing the out-of-time (in several senses) feel of the music. And once again, high praise for the orchestral, with special kudos for Christopher Devlin on harpsichord, all under the baton of the masterful Joseph Colaneri. The production runs through August 15, and you’ll find more info at glimmerglass.org.

The Rake’s Progress
Music by Igor Stravinsky
Libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman
Conducted by Joseph Colaneri
Directed by Eric Sean Fogel
Alice Busch Opera Theater, The Glimmerglass Festival
Cooperstown, New York, July 19, 2025