Music: Rousing the Rake in Florence

Ken Russell updates Stravinsky in a splashy opera debut

Ken Russell has never been one to do anything halfway. Propelled by a flamboyant visual imagination, the British director, 54, has shocked audiences with his horrific The Devils, astounded them with his psychedelic imagery for the rock opera Tommy and scandalized them with his racy, irreverent looks at mighty composers, such as Lisztomania.

All this has happened on the screen. Now Russell has turned to the stage for the first time—directing, of all unlikely things, Igor Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress at the 45th Maggio Musicale festival in Florence. Stravinsky, whose centenary is being celebrated this year, conducted the premiere of The Rake in Venice in 1951, and the work has acquired the status of a classic among the composer's admirers. But Russell, ever the iconoclast, has turned it upside down. The jejune quality of Stravinsky's cool, mock-Mozartian music is engulfed in a rush of theatrical inventiveness that is often sensitively analytical, at times tasteless and, in the end, dramatically convincing—not an easy task with this opera.

The problem with The Rake has always been the music. Stravinsky's neoclassical score is much admired by musicians for its technical accomplishment as a modernistic evocation of the classical period. But The Rake rarely succeeds at being anything more than a pastiche, and as a result, it fails to engage the emotions as a full-blooded opera should.

Russell's great inspiration is to solve the paradox at the opera's core, that of a modern work in courtly guise. If the music will not carry the dramatic load, then the action must. The director updates the splendid, rather literary W.H. Auden-Chester Kallmann libretto from 18th century to contemporary England without altering a word of text. Realized by Designer Derek Jarman, the images are vivid and immediate, painted in hard, splashy colors to evoke a drug-and crime-ridden world.

The Rake—inspired by the famous series of Hogarth engravings—tells the story of Tom Rakewell (Tenor Gösta Winbergh), a naive but lustful country boy who falls under the spell of the Devil, Nick Shadow (Baritone Istvan Gati). Abandoning his sweetheart Anne Trulove (Soprano Cecilia Gasdia) for the fleshpots of London, Tom sinks ever deeper into degradation until he finally goes mad and is committed to Bedlam. In Russell's production, Tom sports a gold lame suit and a Sony Walkman. Baba the Turk, the bearded lady whom Tom marries, is a blind pop celebrity in a bright red dress whose comings and goings are recorded for posterity—or at least the evening news—by the watchful electronic media. Nick—who changes costumes to fit Tom's changing impressions of him—commits suicide spectacularly by stepping on the third rail in a deserted London underground station called Angel.

"When they first asked me to do The Rake," says Russell, "my heart sank because I had this memory of the most boring evening of my life. I'm not interested in being different for its own sake, and the music in any opera is sacred to me. But if one is true to the spirit of a work, if you don't destroy that spirit, then you can do what you like."