Mr. Igor Stravinsky is one of the most fascinating, most accomplished, and most varied of modem composers. His early works, like The Firebird, The Rite of Spring, and Petrouchka —all composed before World War I—have become something like popular classics. Since then he has composed in many other styles, none of them quite so popular, and he has half modeled much of his work on earlier music. “Neoclassical,” he has been called. The Rake’s Progress appears to be modeled on late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century opera—anything from Mozart to Rossini, or even Donizetti. Not that you can ever mistake him for these earlier men. It is rather—says one critic—almost as though you were listening to them through one of those crazy Coney Island distorting mirrors. You do have old-fashioned arias, recitatives, concerted numbers—but with what a difference!
 

The story of the opera is based on Hogarth's famous series of lithographs called The Rake’s Progress. Perhaps it would be better to say that it was inspired by that series, for it does not follow the narrative very closely. Rather, the mood, the setting, the morals, a few characters, and a few situations are the same. Mr. Stravinsky worked it out—in general—with the fine English-bom poet Wystan H. Auden, and Auden, in turn, worked out the details with another writer, Chester Kallman. It was done in English. Yet, even when it is sung in the original by an English-speaking cast, there is some difficulty in getting the words, for Mr. Stravinsky does not believe it is always wise to respect the accents of the language.