Comparing The Rakes Progress and The Threepenny Opera Essay -- Compar

Comparing The Rakes Progress and The Threepenny OperaUpon a first listening to the collaborations of Auden-Kallman/Stravinsky in The Rakes Progress and Brecht/Weill in The Threepenny Opera, the topic that there could be anything in common with the two works might seem to require a great stretch of the imagination. While the 1951 Rakes Progress is distinctly neo-classical, and specifically Mozartian, the 1928 Threepenny Opera is as easily termed the precursor to the Broadway musical as it is termed opera. Closer examination of the collaborators sources and motivations, however, reveal several striking coincidences. Both operas tie-in upon eighteenth-century works as their primary sources The Rakes Progress was conceived after Stravinsky saw the 1745 William Hogarth print-sequence of the same name, and The Threepenny Opera is an adaptation of John Gays The Beggars Opera, written in 1728. (Incidentally, Hogarth also pied a scene from this enormously popular ballad-opera.) The Threep enny Opera follows the ballad-opera tradition, in that it is a series of songs interspersed with dialogue, not recitative. Each scene, as in The Beggars Opera, is complete in itself, pertaining to the whole, but not necessarily driving the action of the plot. Stravinskys initial conception, though not realized, was to write an Opera with definitely separated numbers connected by spoken (not sung) words of the text, ... to avoid the customary operatic recitative (Griffiths 10). Brechts libretto reads like a Marxist manifesto, and although The Rakes Progress is by no means overtly Marxist, Audens most stern objection to Hogarths Rakes Progress was based on his reading it as a bourgeois parable ... he approached Hogarths pr... .... Eighteenth-Centruy Plays. Ed. Ricardo Quintana. New York McGraw-Hill, 1952. 179-238. Griffiths, Paul with Igor Stravinsky, Robert Craft and Gabriel Josipovici. Igor Stravinsky The Rakes Progress. Cambridge Opera Handbooks. Cambridge Cambridge UP, 1982. Lin denberger, Herbert. Anti-theatricality in Twentieth hundred Opera. Modern Drama 44.3 (2001) 300-317. Paulson, Ronald. Auden, Hogarth, and The Rakes Progress. Raritan A Quarterly Review 16.2 (1996) 30pp. http//shelley.library.ualberta.ca8590/mla?sp.nextform=mainfrm. htm&sp. usernumber. Savage, Robert. Making a Libretto Three Collaborations over The Rakes Progress. Oedipus Rex / The Rakes Progress. English National Opera Guides 43. Ed. Nicholas John.London John Calder Publishers, 1991. 45-58. Stravinsky, Igor and Robert Craft. Memories and Commentaries. London Faber, 1959.