EVENT NAME: Opera The Rake's Progress

EVENT PLACE: Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino - Sala Zubin Mehta

EVENT DATE: from March 12th to 26th 2023

EVENT DESCRIPTION

After moving to the United States in 1939, Igor Stravinsky toyed with the idea of ??writing an opera in English. The project took shape only after a few years when in 1947 the composer was struck by the cycle of canvases by William Hogarth exhibited at the Chicago Art Institute, which described the rise and fall of Tom Rakewell, a spendthrift who senselessly squanders his possessions and ends his days in an asylum. Stravinsky immediately thought of making it into an opera and turned to the British poet Wystan Hugh Auden for the writing of the libretto, who will also be joined by Chester Kallmann. In March 1948 the libretto was ready, while Stravinsky took more time for the music, finishing the score only three years later. The Rake's Progress debuted at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice on 11 September 1951 with the same author on the podium for the world premiere. Organized in arias, recitatives, choirs and ensembles in line with the eighteenth-century theatrical scheme, the work shows a decidedly retrospective character and represents the last stage of Stravinsky's 'neoclassical' period. And if the declared reference model is the theater of Mozart and Da Ponte - in particular the Cosi fan tutte - in Rake's Progress numerous citations and references to different eras and authors are piled up, underlining once again the ability of Stravinsky to assimilate in a way organic every element of the musical tradition.

New staging

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