The Rake's Progress is Stravinsky's biggest work and one of the few great operas written since the 1920s, rare too for the unusual quality of its libretto, by Auden and Kallman. Its importance is undisputed, but so too are the problems it raises: problems of both performance and understanding, caused by the irony with which it is so thoroughly permeated. In aspects of style and operatic convention it looks back to the eighteenth century, and in particular to the operas of Mozart and da Ponte, while making references also to other periods, to operas from Monteverdi to Verdi. Yet at the same time it is wholly a work of the twentieth-century, and indeed it is centrally concerned with the impossibility of return, artistic, psychological or actual, as well as with the nature and limitation of human free will. The Rake's Progress is not one of unbridled dissipation but rather, more interestingly, one of attachment to naive notions of freedom and choice, and his tragedy is that he can never go back.
"The true story of how Rachel Johnson - born into one of Britain's most famous political families - tries and fails to get elected in the 2019 hard-fought effort to stop Brexit, running against her older brother, Boris, and what she learns in the process about politics, ambition, family, marriage, and winning and losing"--
"The Rake's Progress" by Marjorie Bowen Margaret Gabrielle Vere Long, who used the pseudonyms Marjorie Bowen and Joseph Shearing, was a British author who wrote historical romances. In this book, she follows a so-proclaimed rake, a womanizer who was perfectly set in his ways. However, even the most charming playboy isn't immune to the magic that happens when stricken by true love and the desire for romance.
A highly illustrated journey through Hogarth's series paintings and engravings, from the blockbuster 'Rake's Progress and Marriage a la Mode' to the enigmatic and lesser known Happy Marriage this book offers a close analysis of place and setting in Hogarth's works' in order to revisit the artist's complex stance on morality, society, and the city, and the enduring appeal of his satires in the present.0William Hogarth (1697-1764) remains one of Britain's best loved painters. His most renowned works, the series relating to moral subjects, are rarely displayed together, and will be united at the Soane Museum for the first time in its history.0The book also focusses tightly on Hogarth's series; The Soane Museum's own Rake's Progress and An Election, as well as Marriage a la Mode, the Four Times of Day, as well as the three surviving paintings of The Happy Marriage engraved series such as Stages of Cruelty, Industry and Idleness and Gin Lane and Beer Street. It is edited by David Bindman, a world authority on Hogarth and comprises four essays by leading academics, along with Bindman's own introduction to each of the series according to the themes of "place" and "progress".00Exhibition: Sir John Soane's Museum, London, UK (09.10.2019-05.01.2020).
William Hogarth (1697-1764) was among the first British-born artists to rise to international recognition and acclaim and to this day he is considered one of the country's most celebrated and innovative masters. His output encompassed engravings, paintings, prints, and editorial cartoons that presaged western sequential art. This comprehensive catalogue of his paintings brings together over twenty years of scholarly research and expertise on the artist, and serves to highlight the remarkable diversity of his accomplishments in this medium. Portraits, history paintings, theater pictures, and genre pieces are lavishly reproduced alongside detailed entries on each painting, including much previously unpublished material relating to his oeuvre. This deeply informed publication affirms Hogarth's legacy and testifies to the artist's enduring reputation. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
W. H. Auden called opera the "last refuge of the High Style," and considered it the one art in which the grand manner survived the ironic levelings of modernity. He began writing libretti soon after he arrived in America in 1939 and abandoned his earlier attempts to write public, political drama. Opera gave him the opportunity to rise to the high style in public, not in an attempt to elevate his own status as a poet, but in service of the heroic voice of the singers. These works present their mythical actions with a direct intensity unlike anything in even his greatest poems. In this volume of Auden and Chester Kallman's libretti, extensive historical and textual notes trace the history of the production and revision of the works and provide full texts of early scenarios, as well as abandoned and rewritten scenes. Almost all the works included here were previously published in incomplete and often inaccessible editions--or were never published at all. The book prints for the first time the full text of Paul Bunyan, Auden's first libretto, which he wrote for music by Benjamin Britten. It also includes Auden and Kallman's The Rake's Progress, written for Igor Stravinsky, and Delia, written for Stravinsky but never set to music. The book continues with Auden and Kallman's two libretti written for music by Hans Werner Henze, Elegy for Young Lovers and The Bassarids, and their adaptation of Love's Labour's Lost, composed by Nicolas Nabokov. It also contains their translation of The Magic Flute, with its scenes reordered for greater dramatic coherence and added dialogue for sharper mythical significance, and their antimasque, The Entertainment of the Senses, for music by John Gardner. The book contains two radio plays--The Dark Valley, a monologue written by Auden alone, and The Rocking Horse Winner, written with James Stern and based on a story by D. H. Lawrence. Also included are the unpublished masque that Auden wrote for Kallman's twenty-second birthday, the unpublished versions of The Dutchess of Malfi that Auden prepared with Bertolt Brecht, scenarios for a film script and a libretto that were never completed, Auden's narrative for the medieval Play of Daniel, two narratives for documentary films, and his song lyrics written for Man of La Mancha before the producer decided to use a different lyricist.
