The Rake’s Progress

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Igor Stravinsky’s three-act opera The Rake’s Progress, one of the most distinctive and multilayered works of the 20th century, an allegorical tale about the pursuit of happiness, the ambivalence of ethical choices, and the limits of free will, will be presented by the Greek National Opera in the 2026/27 season in a new production that engages in a creative dialogue with the very history of opera. Staged by distinguished director Alexandros Efklidis, the work is approached as a living opera museum, a wandering through time, in which different eras and aesthetics coexist, illuminating the enduring tension between tradition and contemporary perspectives.

The opera features an English libretto by the renowned poet Wystan Hugh Auden and Chester Kallman, inspired by William Hogarth’s engravings that satirised 18th-century English society and depicted moments from the life of Tom Rakewell, the son of a wealthy merchant who squanders his entire fortune on gambling and a luxurious lifestyle. The work was first performed in 1951, six years after the end of World War II, at Teatro La Fenice in Venice.

At the heart of the story is the journey of the young Tom Rakewell, a character whose life is shaped less by his choices than by his abandonment of them. Tom rejects the prospect of an honourable yet conventional life in the country to seek his destiny in cosmopolitan London. Carried away by the enigmatic, Mephistophelian figure of Nick Shadow, Tom abandons his faithful fiancée, Anne Truelove, and plunges himself into a world of exhibitionist consumption, moral confusion, and irrational decisions. Through a series of unfortunate decisions—from an eccentric marriage to a woman he doesn’t love to an investment in a deceitful ‘miraculous’ machine—Tom gradually loses control of his destiny. What begins as fruitless idealism and the pursuit of pleasure ends in existential ennui and painful economic and mental bankruptcy. Despite Anne’s selfless efforts to save him, Tom’s journey ends tragically in Bedlam’s psychiatric hospital, where, having already lost his identity, he seeks redemption in his illusions.

Reflecting the work’s dual nature, which moves between the past and the present, between memory and reenactment, the new production’s direction creates an aesthetic universe that draws on elements from the 18th to the 20th centuries. The performance explores the concepts of historicity and dramatic representation, offering an interpretation in which opera itself becomes an object of reflection. As the stage director Alexandros Efklidis characteristically notes: ‘The Rake’s Progress is considered by some as the “last opera” and by others as the first “meta-opera”. Whether we regard it as a late neoclassical work or a forerunner of postmodernism, it remains a piece made of the ingredients of the opera of the past, yet fully aware of the genre’s crisis. However, it is very far from being an anachronistic work. In the new staging of The Rake’s Progress assigned to me by the GNO, I approach the work as an opera museum, playing with its temporal framework and the overall concept of historicity. Remaining within the general context of historicity and “period” performances, I journey through the period between the 18th and 20th centuries—the era that serves as the primary source of music-theatre material for most creators and that most contemporary opera houses use as the core of their repertoire.’

Stravinsky’s music, with its characteristic purity, ironic spirit, and constant dialogue with the past, forms the core of this stage experience. Drawing on the classicist aesthetic while deconstructing it, the score highlights the artificiality of theatrical conventions and illuminates the characters’ deeper contrasts. At times satirical and at others deeply existential, although the work seems to look backward, in reality it blazes new trails for the future of opera, remaining to this day a fascinating and sharp-edged study of human nature.

The production will feature distinguished and emerging Greek and international protagonists, including Christos Kechris, Danae Kontora, Dimitri Platanias, Anita Rachvelishvili, and Yannis Kalyvas.