The Rake's Progress and Stravinsky's Return: The Composer's Evolving Approach to Setting Text

Stravinsky has a deserved reputation for manipulating the sound of words, which, among other factors, has given rise to accusations of “antihumanism” against the composer and his music. However, close analysis of the opera The Rake's Progress (1948–51) shows that Stravinsky actually takes care to set the text intelligibly, and at certain moments, even expressively. By analyzing metric displacement and motivic development as it evolved from the composer's earlier neoclassical settings—including Oedipus Rex (1927), the Symphony of Psalms (1930), and Perséphone (1934)—through his first efforts at serial composition in the Cantata (1952), this article contextualizes the seemingly anomalous expressiveness in The Rake's Progress. Discovery of this evolution in his approach to setting text also entails a reassessment of the composer's aesthetic concerns.