“The Rake's Progress”

Extract

The Rake's Progress occupies an unique place in Strawinsky's output: it is his only full-length work for the theatre. This may seem a surprising statement to make in view of the fact that his main successes as a composer during the last forty years have occurred in the theatres of Europe and America: yet until the completion of this opera he had never written anything that would fill an evening's bill. The longest of his ballets plays for no more than three-quarters of an hour; and neither his lyric tale, The Nightingale, his opera-oratorio, Oedipus Rex, nor his melodrama, Persephone, exceeds an hour in length, excluding intervals. It is typical of the problems attendant on the production of Strawinsky's so-called ‘full-scale’ works that when the Berlin Krolloper wanted to mount Oedipus Rex at the beginning of 1928, Mavra and The Soldier's Tale had to be thrown in as make-weights.