7 - Stravinsky's theatres

Summary

. . . good or bad,

All men are mad;

All they say or do is theatre.

baba, ‘epilogue ’, the rake’s progress

In his Bloch Lectures given at the University of California at Berkeley in 1995, the British composer Jonathan Harvey presented his ideas on The Rake's Progress, a work he described as being ‘aware of its own derivativeness’. The Rake, he argued, is ‘the most explicit manifestation of self-effacement’, its meaning deriving ‘not from authorship, but from formal pattern-play and ingenuity’. While such a view determinedly underlines the ‘proto-postmodern’ tendencies in Stravinsky, it is also interesting that it echoes strongly Stravinsky's own aesthetic as articulated in the 1930s (via his various ghostwriters) in such public statements as the Autobiography and the Harvard lectures. In the Poetics of Music, Stravinsky proclaims that ‘It is through the unhampered play of its functions … that a work is revealed and justified.’ With specific regard to The Rake, Stravinsky observed that it is

… emphatically, an opera – an opera of arias and recitatives, choruses and ensembles. Its musical structure, the conception of the use of these forms, even to the relations of tonalities, is in the line of the classical tradition.