The Last Opera

<I>The Rake's Progress</I> in the Life of Stravinsky and Sung Drama

Chandler Carter

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780253041616
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica lirica

From the fall of 1947 through the summer of 1951 composer Igor Stravinsky and poet W. H. Auden collaborated on the opera The Rake's Progress. At the time, their self-consciously conventional work seemed to appeal only to conservative audiences. Few perceived that Stravinsky and Auden were confronting the central crisis of the Modern age, for their story of a hapless eighteenth-century Everyman dramatizes the very limits of human will, a theme Auden insists underlies all opera. In The Last Opera, Chandler Carter weaves together three interlocking stories. The central and most detailed story explores the libretto and music of The Rake's Progress. The second positions the opera as a focal point in Stravinsky's artistic journey and those who helped him realize it—his librettists, Auden and Chester Kallman; his protégé Robert Craft; and his compatriot, fellow composer, and close friend Nicolas Nabokov. By exploring the ominous cultural landscape in which these fascinating individuals lived and worked, the book captures a pivotal twenty-five-year span (from approximately 1945 to 1970) during which modernists like Stravinsky and Auden confronted a tectonic disruption to their artistic worldview. Ultimately, Carter reveals how these stories fit into a larger third narrative, the 400-year history of opera. This richly and lovingly contextualized study of The Rake's Progress sheds new light on why, despite the hundreds of musical dramas and theater pieces that have been written since its premier in 1951, this work is still considered the "the last opera."

PART 1

THE CULTURAL MOMENT

PRELUDE

COMPOSER IGOR STRAVINSKY AND POET W. H. AUDEN—TWO of the finest artists and most compelling minds of the twentieth century—collaborated from the fall of 1947 through the summer of 1951 on an opera, The Rake’s Progress. At the time, their self-consciously conventional work seemed to appeal only to conservative audiences. Few perceived the creators were also confronting the central crisis of the modern age, for their story of a hapless eighteenth-century Everyman dramatizes the very limits of human will, a theme Auden insists underlies all Opera.

The story of their collaboration, the opera itself, and its subsequent reception also reveal each man’s struggle to assert himself. Inner vision and outer forces especially drove the life and work of Stravinsky. He possessed perhaps the most distinctly individual voice in twentieth-century music, yet openly sought to be influenced and not just musically. Friends and colleagues he drew in close positively shaped his personal and professional choices, especially in his early and later years; those he kept at a distance did so negatively. The larger world of ideas and events, both great and terrible, likewise molded him. Revolution and world wars twice dislocated him from his home and loved ones, severing old ties and creating new ones; politics, in government and in the arts, stifled as well as kindled opportunities; competing ideologies established the terms we use to discuss his music and with which even the composer defined himself.

Probably more than any musician of his time, Stravinsky sought to control his circumstances, in part by shaping how the world perceived him and his work. Of the impact of Diaghilev and eighteenth-century classicism on his Pulcinella, he contended: “I created the possibility of the commission as much as it created me.”¹ The Great Artist fascinates not just because he (the type is gendered) embodies the Zeitgeist, which is to say the cultural moment expresses itself through him. He also—and by contrast—exemplifies the very possibility of autonomy against the raging tempest of ideas, people, and events. In other words, Great Artists, we imagine, create the cultural moment. We exalt them as “unique creators irreducible to any condition or conditioning.”² Indeed, their collective stories have defined the modern age. Postmodern scholars try to crack their seemingly freestanding facades, but the allure of the artist remains. Through him we project an ideal version of our collective self—at least, I confess, I so imagine Igor Stravinsky. If this brilliant, diminutive Russian émigré could somehow navigate the storms and stresses of his time and still assert artistic control, defy commercial pressures and still thrive, determine the nature and scope of his most ambitious work despite countless obstacles and entrenched resistance, then perhaps a vestige of autonomy remains.

To balance these competing perspectives The Last Opera will tell three stories, each framing but also interwoven with the next. The central, most detailed story explores Stravinsky’s longest work and possibly richest collaboration. These chapters present a case study in the extent to which individuals and their work can encapsulate their time.³ The second story fills out that time by positioning the opera as a focal point in the journeys of Stravinsky and those who helped him realize it—librettists Wystan H. Auden and Chester Kallman; his protégé Robert Craft; and his compatriot, fellow composer, and close friend, Nicolas Nabokov. By exploring the ominous cultural landscape in which these fascinating individuals lived and worked, the book extends well beyond a single opera and its nominal creators. It captures a pivotal twenty-five-year span (roughly 1945–70) during which modernists like Stravinsky and Auden confronted a tectonic shift in their world. This story in turn becomes swept up in the 400-year history of opera that both coincides with and marks the larger modern era. Observations about this seemingly waning genre frame the book and, thus, I begin.

The Last Opera?

My title is more conversation starter than definitive claim. Auden might have approved, though he would have thought of his collaboration with Stravinsky as a new first opera rather the last. Shortly after he delivered the completed libretto on March 31, 1948, the poet wrote for Vogue a light piece explaining the opera fanatic as he understood him:

He is a conservative who does not welcome new opera; there are too many from the Golden Age which he has still to hear. That age is over: after Verdi and Wagner come Puccini and Strauss, but one can not listen to either without being conscious that this is the end of something. From Gluck until them the development of the form is continuous and organic, but there it stops. New operas may and, let us hope, will be written, but their composers can not carry on from where their predecessors left off, but must start anew from the beginning.⁴

Auden neither openly confessed to being such a fanatic nor did he mention his ongoing collaboration with the world’s most famous living composer, though neither was a secret. (Lincoln Kirstein described the poet to Stravinsky: “He adores opera; he spends half his time playing records of Mozart and Verdi; for him opera is a ritual.”⁵) The irony, or at least tension between these two conditions, was not lost on the librettist; rather, he was attempting, implicitly, to frame the creation of their new opera in light of that tension. How does one go about creating sung drama in the mid-twentieth century? If conventional opera doesn’t interest you, then explore new creative paths. Yet, if you love Opera—as Stravinsky, Auden, and Kallman all professed—following that well-traveled road would seem, as the poet suggests, to lead to a dead end. And just how does one “start anew from the beginning”? These questions form a jumping off point for my exploration of The Rake, its creators, and its place in the operatic canon.

Artists and critics have been pronouncing the death of major art forms—painting, the novel, and ballet—for almost a century.⁶ With the demise of old Europe, so the reasoning goes, came the demise of its cultured institutions. Like Auden, many date the end of opera to the last works of Puccini or Strauss. Pierre Boulez insisted, “No opera worth discussing has been composed since Wozzeck [1922] and Lulu [1935].”⁷ Even Schoenberg’s Erwartung (1909) has received a vote for this dubious distinction. The justification for such claims is that in the late modern and postmodern age opera functions anachronistically, as an elaborately preserved relic of a temporally distant cultural practice. “Whereas anthropologists have to travel to the primeval forests of South America and to the islands of the Pacific to find relics of ancient social rituals,” writes philosopher Mladen Dolar, “we merely need to go to the opera.”⁸

Dolar and coauthor Žižek associate the death of opera with the birth of psychoanalysis (hence, their vote for Erwartung). They claim that, in dramatizing ancient and modern myths, opera functioned to process and interpret the psychic underpinnings of modern man. Gary Tomlinson develops a similar thesis by tracing the “changing picture of envoiced subjectivity in the early modern and modern West” through the history of opera.⁹ Rendered obsolete by the discoveries of Freud, Dolar argues, opera now occupies the hallowed halls of culture more as a preserved ritual than as a vital aesthetic force.

Auden makes essentially the same point, but being a true modernist he refused to surrender without a fight. His collaboration with Stravinsky only further whetted his appetite for this obsolete genre, which he compared favorably to the ancient tradition that first inspired it: “As a period of sustained creative activity in one medium, the seventy-five-odd years of Athenian drama . . . are surpassed by the hundred and twenty-five years between Gluck’s Orpheus and Verdi’s Othello, which comprise the golden age of European opera.”¹⁰ Indeed, for Auden the operatic voice expressed—and continues to express—the essential force driving the modern subject:

The golden age of opera, from Mozart to Verdi, coincided with the golden age of liberal humanism, of unquestioning belief in freedom and progress. If good operas are rarer today [1951], this may be because, not only have we learned that we are less free than nineteenth-century humanism imagined, but also have become less certain that freedom is an unequivocal blessing, that the free are necessarily the good. To say that operas are more difficult to write does not mean that they are impossible. That would only follow if we should cease to believe in free-will and personality altogether. Every high C accurately struck utterly demolishes the theory that we are the irresponsible puppets of fate or chance.¹¹

Auden meant the reference to high C literally and may have argued the same point when he talked Stravinsky into altering his original ending of Anne’s act 1 Cabaletta, shown in example 0.1. In early 1949, during his annual winter trip to New York, Stravinsky played through the completed first act for a group of close friends. Robert Craft describes the scene:

Example 0.1. Comparison of original version (a) and final version (b) of the end of Anne’s cabaletta (1.3).

We got to Sasha Schneider’s for the Rake. Nabokov and Patricia [Blake] are already there, and Balanchine who, with Auden, follows the score over I. S.’s shoulder at the piano . . . Auden seems unaware that his violations of the strict rule of silence have irritated I. S. to an explosive degree. At the conclusion of the act, Auden asks him to change the soprano’s final note to a high “C.” The word is wrong, I. S. says, whereupon Auden, after much “uh-uh-uh”-ing and “now-let’s-see”-ing, comes up with a new last ending in “heart.”¹²

Auden described the play-through to his partner and colibrettist:

I went off to the Ambassador Hotel to go through Act I. All your suggestions were conveyed and enthusiastically received; I wish you had been there to get the credit. I’m afraid you’ll have to swallow my couplet for the Cabaletta

Time cannot alter

Thy loving heart

Thy ever-loving heart.

I was faced with fitting it into the music and it was the only thing I could think up that would fit.

The performance was from the piano score with the maestro at the piano: Bob Craft, Balanchine, self etc. screaming parts.¹³

That Stravinsky, even when irritated, was willing to make such a significant change attests to his respect for—and agreement with—Auden’s reasoning. The poet was not asking for a merely conventional ending. On the contrary, for him the soprano’s vocal feat, clichéd though it may be, attests to the possibility of individuation.

Enticed by opera’s connection to deeper philosophical issues, Auden with Kallman would produce four more libretti: Delia (1952), which Stravinsky declined to set; Elegy for Young Lovers (1956) and The Bassarids (1961) for Hans Werner Henze; and Love’s Labour’s Lost (1973) for Nicolas Nabokov. Elegy has even clawed its way into the repertoire of European houses. Indeed, this expensive rite continues to attract leading composers—the late modernist masters who have indulged themselves (Stockhausen, Ligeti, Berio, Messiaen, even Elliot Carter) would seem to outnumber those who haven’t—which may only testify to its lingering cachet. As with artists and performers, death seems to have enha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1: The Cultural Moment
• Part 2: The Drama
• Part 3: The Music
• Part 4: Performance
• Part 5: After The Rake
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author