Opera, Allegory, and Remembrance: The Certain Melody in Auden’s and Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress

The Rake’s Progress (1951), Stravinsky’s sole full-length opera, is based on a libretto written by W. H. Auden in collaboration with his life partner Chester Kallman.¹ A central scene of the opera, in which the hero contemplates his past and the few options his future has in store, is set in a churchyard. That the hero’s forcible act of remembrance should take place there is hardly coincidental. Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928) need but be recalled to contend that graveyards and ruins can be associated with the dialectal mode of allegory. Like allegories, these topoi do not refer to concrete historical events, but to the transience of time and history, to the actuality of the past in the present.² Leafing through the entire libretto of The Rake’s Progress, it is hard to overlook how Auden’s text takes stock of the past in the present. In both content and form the libretto dusts off bygone narratives and styles; the plot is borrowed from William Hogarth’s eight famous engravings tracing the grim downward course of a typical Augustan rake,³ while the texture of the text resembles a Tudor hodgepodge with mock hexameters, echo effects, and parody of the mass. Much like Stravinsky’s score, for which the composer took his cue from the eighteenth-century number opera, Auden’s text presents a stylistic pastiche of long-outmoded conventions. The basic question thereby raised was poignantly phrased by Stravinsky, who hinted at the allegorical mode into which his cooperation with Auden was cast when he wondered whether they could “re-use the past and at the same time move in a forward direction?”⁴ Put differently, could the opera, as a late modernist piece of work,⁵ be read as a continuation of modernism’s more experimental moment in the preceding decades, or did it oppose that moment?⁶

For Stravinsky it did both.⁷The Rake’s Progress is commonly considered the last operatic work in his so-called phase of neoclassicism. Although the precise cultural and political inclination of this phase in Stravinsky’s work remains a topic of debate,⁸ it was ultimately defined by a revival of older, pre-romantic styles and models to the end of questioning the dominance of other, contemporary styles and models. Or, as Theodor Adorno put it: Stravinsky “permanently wrote music about music, because he wrote music against music.”⁹ Hence, by reintroducing bygone conventions in a contemporary context, Stravinsky not only meant to revive the past but also to change the face of music in the present. In contrast to Stravinsky, Auden never made explicit if and how his apparently outmoded libretto reflected on the modernist exploits that forewent it. This can mean two things. Either he agreed with Stravinsky’s anti-romantic, anti-expressivist, and largely formalist aesthetic, or he had his own, unpronounced, and perhaps even private, reasons for believing that his text appositely dealt with the aesthetic past in the postwar period. I intend to show both were the case by focusing on Auden’s libretto as well as on his remarks on the art of opera. As in Benjamin’s allegorical ruin, we will see past and present interlocking in often complex ways—and at least one of these entanglements has to my knowledge been completely neglected thus far.

Auden set out working on the libretto from 1947 onward. Since The Rake’s Progress premiered in Venice in 1951, the text has received attention from a variety of angles, yet no one has read the libretto as an allegorical account through which Auden in the late forties assessed his own romantic political aspirations for poetry in the preceding decade of the thirties.¹⁰ My aim is to show that Auden, unlike Stravinsky, primarily criticized his own modernist writings from his so-called English period (1927–39), while at the same time contemplating which aspects of those writings were worth retaining. The libretto invites such an allegorical interpretation on two fronts. First, its...