Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress

I had no idea till a few weeks ago that Stravinsky or anyone else had written an opera based on William Hogarth's picture cycle which lives in the John Soane Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields in London. When I first came back to England in 1973 I worked for the Ministry of National Insurance in an office in High Holborn a couple of minutes away, and the Soane Museum was a favourite lunchtime haunt. The paintings of A Rake's Progress are housed on hinged panels on the wall of one of the museum's rooms so you can never see them all at once - as you open one panel to see the painting behind the painting on the front of it is hidden.

Well, we had a notification of a performance of Stravinsky's opera to take place for one night only at a grand estate just outside Cambridge. I am not that keen on the composer but the lure of seeing a Jacobean house and gardens that are not usually open to the public are what tempted me.

The rain on Saturday afternoon cleared enough for us to walk round the lovely gardens before the performance, though the picnickers had had to forgo sitting on the grass and eat at tables inside a Victorian barn which must be 100 yards long if it's an inch. That barn was made of wood; the one the opera took place in was a modern tin one.

The music of the opera is delightful, and the libretto may be too. It was written by W H Auden and his boyfriend at the time, one Chester Kallman. Unfortunately for us the acoustic in the barn was such that much of the time the singers' words were drowned out. I thought that this was perhaps that Stravinsky didn't know how to write for opera, but Rosalind pointed out that in a conventional operal house the orchestra would be in a pit and the sound therefor somewhat muffled, whereas here they were sitting next to the stage in a tin barn.

Anyway, it was good and I would happily see the opera again and any other production by Opera East. Unfortunately though I forgot the camera at the last moment so didn't get any pictures of the house, the barns, the Jacobean chapel or the gardens.