Dialogues with Pushkin: From Tchaikovsky to Stravinsky and The Rake’s Progress

Abstract

A key feature of the study of Russian opera has been its interest in ‘page-tostage’ adaptation of canonical works of literature. Behind this research story, in many respects, there is only the fact that a significant number of Russian operas are really based on literary primary sources. The contribution of philologists who have studied this subject on a par with specialists in the history of music also played a role in its credibility. This logocentric approach overlooks, however, another tradition, one in which the libretto is the product of a negotiation between agents and where the relationship between the source text and operatic adaptation is attenuated. The work that most fully subverts the ‘pageto-stage’ tradition and fully incorporates the librettist as a co-creator of the finished composition is The Rake’s Progress, with music by Igor Stravinsky and words by Wystan Hugh Auden and Chester Kallman. It may seem eccentric to see The Rake’s Progress as a Russian opera, yet as this chapter argues, it is certainly an opera shaped by aspects of Stravinsky’s Russian origins, upbringing, and education, and somehow spoken ‘in translation’. In particular, it engages in a series of intertextual dialogues with the legacy of Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades.