Opera Addict: The Rake’s Progress and W.H. Auden’s Operatic Theory

The article demonstrates how W.H. Auden’s newfound knowledge of the operatic tradition influenced his approach to writing the libretto for The Rake’s Progress, his 1951 collaboration with co-librettist Chester Kallman and composer Igor Stravinsky. It contends that the opera’s protagonist, Tom Rakewell, ironically dramatizes Auden’s evolving ideas about the singular capacities of music and opera to represent the subjective experience of the will’s free movement within the bounds of time. Forsaking any claim to realist objectivity, The Rake’s Progress celebrates artifice as it explores the relationships between tradition and innovation, cyclicality and linearity, and recurrence and becoming.