Musically and dramatically, the production of The Rake’s Progress that I saw last night at the Met was practically perfect. From the moment Paul Appleby appeared onstage in the central role of Tom Rakewell—swinging his arms and shuffling his feet with casual grace, connecting viscerally with Layla Claire’s charming Anne Truelove, and singing Auden’s clever words in his strong, delightful, clear tenor—I knew we were in good hands. The good hands were those of Jonathan Miller, who developed this production nearly twenty years ago and is responsible for its overall intelligence. They were also the conducting hands of James Levine, who brought forth Stravinsky’s compelling music with verve and understanding. They were the designing hands of Peter J. Davison, who created the marvelous, understated yet beautiful sets, and Judy Levin, who oversaw the costumes, and Jennifer Tipton, who did the lighting. And some of these good hands were voices: the mellow hilarity of Stephanie Blythe as Baba the Turk, the eerie threat of Gerald Finley as Nick Shadow, and so on. But to distinguish among these individual contributors seems false to the sense of the performance as a whole, which had that coherence which only the most truthful productions manage.
If I had a complaint, it was about the three- or four- or sometimes five-minute waits we had to sit through, often in complete silence, as the sets were changed between scenes. Was there nothing to be done about this? No, there was not, if we wanted to get the full effect of Davison’s great backdrops. And besides, I came to feel that those moments of curtain-falling black-out were like the spaces between the individual images in the Hogarth series that inspired this opera. Miller was certainly alluding to the Hogarths at times in this production—particularly in the madhouse Pietá, where Anne held the broken Tom in her arms—so it made sense for the opera scenes to exist separately yet also in combination, as they do in the original sequence of paintings. (An aside on those paintings: you can see Hogarth’s engravings of The Rake’s Progress just about anywhere, but to see the painted versions, you have to go to Sir John Soane’s house in London and ask the guard to open the special cabinet doors for you. At least, that’s how it was done when I first saw them, and it was a rare and unforgettable treat.)
The silence during these breaks between scenes eventually became, for me, part of the sound of the opera. It was a particularly twentieth-century sound: neither atonal nor melodic, neither sung-through nor spoken, but somehow allowing everything that reached our ears—including speech, including silence, including the clatter of objects thrown on the ground—to attain the quality of music. This too is part of the show, and it is real, as this theater space with you in it is real, and not just imaginary: that is what the silent breaks were hinting to us. So we were ready to hear it explicitly, and were able by then to fully take it in, when the opera’s intelligent, moving epilogue told us exactly that.