An intimidating music history professor 45 years my senior, who had made it abundantly clear that his advocacy had tipped the scales in my favor toward my receiving a summer fellowship for study abroad, bestowed the bonus gift of a single ticket to a late summer 1978 Glyndebourne Festival performance of Stravinsky’s 1951 opera. It was the second revival of a 1975 staging by John Cox, with décor based on Hogarth’s original engravings by David Hockey, that had already received unanimous international acclaim.
But listening to the 1964 Columbia recording led by the composer as preparation left me cold; I’d been similarly unmoved viewing reproductions of Hogarth’s artwork. At 20, I was unshakeable in my conviction that “real” operas had curves—preferably both roomy and lushly grand enough to accommodate wallowing. And their libretti similarly required oversize emotions and heart-on-sleeve sincerity. Stravinsky’s sharp, clean edges and the brilliantly witty wordplay of Auden and Kallman seemed like force-fed roughage to my insatiably carnivore young self.
Yet encountering the opera in this production at Glyndebourne (with a pre-renovation capacity under 900) beguiled me thoroughly. Hockney’s synesthetic response to the music and words yielded stage pictures in a color palette that reflected the story uncannily. A splash of red in the opening scene on Rakewell’s jacket “bled” into the overall color scheme as his success and debauchery escalated. Tautly cross-hatched black and white designs, lit with subtle genius by Robert Bryan, accompanied his demise. Cox’s blocking told the story cleanly, trusting that the density of material provided his singers by the composer and librettists gave them ample tools to express their characters without an extra layer of busyness.
Add the luxury of experiencing all this in so intimate a venue with exhilarating musical execution by Bernard Haitink and the LPO, and I was an instant and total convert. The cast was a fine ensemble, with Felicity Lott’s Anne and Samuel Ramey’s “banality of evil” Shadow particularly memorable. The technology available in 1975 for opera on video doesn’t do Hockney justice; a film made during the 35th Anniversary run in 2010 gives a far clearer idea of the production’s genius. Given its longevity and worldwide currency, has any production in the last half-century done more to win people over to this masterpiece?
