No two works of Stravinsky are alike, but The Rake's Progress is more different than most.

As we look back over that amazing list of masterpieces, what strikes us now is the unity of the entire canon. From Le Sacre du Printemps to Abraham and Isaac half a century later the ‘feel’ of a Stravinsky work is unmistakable: that combination of a hieratic, ritualistic style with a wonderfully lively and witty texture. (The only comparable achievement is the work of the late Yeats.) This is particularly evident in the stage works. ‘Les Noces’, Stravinsky said, ‘presents rather than tells’. Here, as in Oedipus, the music and the stage action show a ritual unfolding, much as a priest might show an icon to the crowd, in André Boucourechlev's apt analogy. These works eschew expressivity, psychology and mimesis; they do not say ‘I am’ or ‘I wish’, but ‘It is’ and ‘It shall be’.

American composers are at the crossroads—at an intersection of three roads, the serial, the neo-baroque and that of the intransigent avant-garde. The serial road, in the Schoenbergian direction, is rapidly growing over with cryptochromatic weeds. The neo-baroque road has been polluted beyond recovery by Stravinsky's acolytes. As to the third road, it has become an Escher print, in which giant ants are twisted on a Möbius strip, with the vistas literally ‘far-out’.

It is interesting to consider Maxwell Davies's three ‘Taverner’ fantasias in relation to the three Leonora overtures of Beethoven. Of course, it is extremely easy to challenge this analogy: the Leonoras were written to be performed with Fidelio, whereas the ‘Taverner’ fantasias were never intended for operatic use. Furthermore, the symphonic proportions, particularly of Leonoras 2 and 3, were completely at variance with Beethoven's need for concision, and led him to reject them in favour of the Fidelio overture, whereas Maxwell Davies has explicitly stated that he felt there were ideas within Taverner which positively demanded further symphonic comment.

The most extensive selection of plates in the volume (13 in all) is devoted to this work. It was originally conceived as a Concerto for Violin, Clarinet, Horn, Piano and String Orchestra and, like the Concerto op. 24, was inspired by (and presumably during) Webern's walking tours in the Carinthian Alps. This is made clear by his verbal outline of the work (top of plate 12) which reads as follows:—