Breaking hearts

The Rake’s Progress, Royal College of Music; The Turn of the Screw, English National Opera

The Royal College of Music’s Britten Theatre is the ideal size for Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, indeed the ideal size for almost every opera I can think of until the first third of the 19th century. What must make it appealing for young singers is that they can sing without straining, that every word can be heard, and that their expressions are visible to everyone in the audience — but of course that deprives them of excuses, too. Not that there was much need of excuses for the second cast of the Rake. First, I must say that the stage designs by Soutra Gilmour and the direction of Tim Carroll were quite brilliant, ranking with Hockney’s long-lasting Inszenierung at Glyndebourne, and clearly influenced by it without deriving from it.

More than with most operas, every aspect of the Rake involves a balancing act, between extreme stylisation and artificiality, and making sure that we can recognise these creatures as fellow humans, and not just figures in a bloodless morality. What makes the balancing more tricky is that neither Auden nor Stravinsky succeeded in maintaining the act themselves. We learn from Robert Craft that the first music that Stravinsky composed for it was the string quartet that opens the graveyard scene, the penultimate scene of the opera, while Auden was beginning to write the libretto proper, after a week’s discussions with the composer. It is not only by far the most impressive music we have heard up to then, but it is also of quite a different kind from anything that precedes it, so that there is a large structural flaw in the work at this late stage.