Igor Stravinsky: The Rake’s Progress

William Hogarth had produced a series of eight paintings and engravings entitled A Rake’s Progress between 1733 and 1735, which captured the rise and fall of Tom Rakewell in a visual language for the first time. Inspired by these images, W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman wrote the libretto for Stravinsky’s masterpiece The Rake’s Progress, which he wrote for the opera La Fenice in Venice in 1951

This production by the Cox-Hochney duo had a considerable impact on international opinion of the work – not only because of its innovative stage design, but also in terms of the attitude that other opera houses and the recording industry took towards it in the 1960s and 1970s. The fact that this production was revived five times from 1975 to 2010 also speaks to its extraordinary quality