The Des Moines Opera presents a Summer Festival of four operas at the Blank Center for the Performing Arts in Indianola, a remote suburb about 30 miles south of the Iowa capitol. Indianola is a quiet place; the Blank Center is ten blocks or so west of the main drag -- to reach the campus of Simpson College where the auditorium is located you drive through an old residential neighborhood along lanes shaded by old trees and big 19th century houses with wraparound porches and lawns punctuated by flower beds. There are about four stop signs at two-block intervals in this neighborhood before you reach the peaceful enclave of the campus -- all the buildings seem to date from the sixties, modest brick and concrete edifices among sidewalks and parking lots on low terraces. Somewhere, I suppose, there are some old administrative buildings with a vaguely ecclesiastical mien, the campus' "Old Main" as it were, but, despite several visits to this place, I have never found that structure or anything resembling a center point in the collection of buildings flanked on all sides by residential neighborhoods. Across from the Blank Center, there's a pinched-looking stadium and field house, more narrow parking lots, more shadowy lawns. (Simpson was founded as a Methodist seminary in 1860; it presently has about 1100 students -- one of its most famous alumni is George Washington Carver.) I attended a performance of Igor Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress (1951) on a sultry night in July 2025. As I drove from Ames, Iowa, where I was staying for the night, to Indianola, I saw vast processions of thunderheads lining up along a front to the east, enormous wind-sculpted towers of cloud with green-blue canyons between the sun-tipped cumulo-nimbus. The sun stays lit for a long time in July in south-central Iowa and the colossal clouds were so far away that I couldn't hear them growling with thunder as I drove through the cornfields and big river valleys full of brown floodwaters.
The Rake's Progress is a "numbers" opera -- that means, it is comprised of a series of set piece compositions written in various musical forms and arranged as illustrations to a narrative that is largely implied but not dramatized. (This kind of opera is the opposite of Wagner's "Gesamtkunst Music Dramas" featuring continuous exposition made coherent by melodic leit motifs; the "numbers opera" is built from independent arias, duets, trios and choruses, often composed in dance measure, with an integument of continuo harpsichord underlying recitative between the numbers.) Stravinsky's opera has one of the finest books ever devised for musical theater -- the libretto, written in the diction and style of Dryden or Alexander Pope, is by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman and the text is a poetic triumph in itself. The plot is episodic but brilliantly shaped and the music is vivid and intricate, the singers often performing in counterpoint against a backdrop of mathematically precise music that sounds like a modernist pastiche of Mozart. There are only a few memorable melodies, but this is true, also to some extent of some of Rossini's operas and other examples of bel canto opera (these works are too well-bred to have showy stand-out tunes) -- the texture of the music is rigorous and intriguing, and the numbers have a tonal delicacy propelled by rhythmic pulse that rhymes with Mozart and Rossini, but not so closely as to seem imitative or parodic; some critics call the opera a pastiche of classical forms, such as Handel's operas and some of Mozart's works, particularly Cosi Fan Tutti with strong elements (mostly supernatural in character) from Don Giovanni. An example of this pastiche composition is the opera's epilogue in which the character's strip off their costumes, rub away make-up, and appear in contemporary clothes to sing the moral of the piece -- something about idle hands being the devil's workshop. (Many of Mozart's operas conclude with this sort of sunny direct address to the audience). But Stravinsky varies from his model -- the moral stated as underlying the piece is obviously completely irrelevant to what we have seen; in other words, the ostensible moral sung by the performers in chorus isn't even arguably the actual moral of the work which is, in fact, far more complex and problematic -- something about desire and the intrinsic fallibility of human endeavor in a world made corrupt by celebrity, greed, and ubiquitous temptation. My point is that, unlike morals expressed in the concluding choruses of classical works, this moral is self-evidently not what the opera was about and seems to be fig leaf concealing something more shameful and perverse in what we have seen. I don't know enough about Auden and Kallman's relationship to be precise about my supposition that the text seems to dramatize a mesalliance between someone who is beautiful, fickle, and unfaithful and a lover who is plain, prudent, and loyal to the point of masochism -- accounts of the tempestuous lifelong liaison between the young, fabulous-looking Kallman and the older poet seem to mirror the relationship between the rather tediously faithful Ann Truelove and the libertine, Thomas Rakewell. The episode involving Rakewell's marriage to a bearded lady, Baba the Turk, also seems to be some sort of campy homosexual joke -- although the libretto is so brilliantly constructed and densely meaningful that these scenes, which were borderline offensive in 1951 (and remain au courant with today's LGBT+ sexual identity politics) can be construed in a variety of ways -- Auden and Kallman's text is overdetermined and, if anything, so crowded with significance that everything can be read literally or figuratively or as satire, but, also, as a sort of crooked and subversive morality play. (In one production that I saw, Baba the Turk seems to be played as a transvestite -- although the role has to be sung by a woman since it is pitched as mezzo-soprano part. Baba's entourage, in that production, consisted of various exotic figures in BDSM gear who continuously finger their cell-phones and take selfies all the time.)
The Rake's Progress adapts (in oblique fashion) Hogarth's series of engravings bearing the same title. The libretto styles itself a "fable". Tom Rakewell professes love for his sweetheart Ann Trulove. Rakewell is selfish, handsome, and ambitious. When he says that he wishes for wealth, a sinister figure, Nick Shadow appears and seems to offer a Faustian bargain to the young man. Shadow will grant his wishes but demands his salary at the end of one year and day. (In some ways, Shadow is the star of the play -- the devil always gets the best lines -- and he sings in a booming basso profundo). Shadow tells Tom that an uncle, unknown to him, has died and left him a fortune. Tom goes to London from his rural estate where he has courted Ann and, promptly, descends into debauchery. We see him at a brothel amid a double chorus of whores and "roaring boys" -- that is, bar- and street-fighting thugs. The madam of the brothel, Mother Goose, chooses Tom as her prize and lover. Later, Tom is bored with his life of idle pleasure, having forgotten all about the loyal Ann. (Ann keeps annoyingly intruding on the action -- she's a drag and, whenever she appears, the opera flags and becomes vaguely maudlin; you can only stand so much of her histrionic masochism). Shadow appears with a suggestion designed to address Tom's ennui -- he encourages him to marry a famous side-show attraction, the bearded lady Baba the Turk. At first, Tom is repelled by the freak, but, after a sung soliloquy that cites Nietzsche, he decides to court and marry Baba as an example of an acte gratuit, an absurdist gesture intended to prove his freedom by choosing an arbitrary fate and accepting it as his destiny. The marriage to Baba becomes dull as well -- she is obsessed with collecting curios and seems to live in a giant Wunderkabinett or "cabinet of curiosities." Ann shows up to whine to Tom about how she has proven to be unworthy. (This is typical of Auden's masochistic approach to this irritating character -- instead of decrying Tom's disloyalty, betrayal, and indolence, she melodramatically says that she is somehow responsible for him mistreating her.) Unable to bear Baba's perpetual bitching (and Ann's passive-aggressive hectoring), Tom puts a cage over his wife's bearded visage, thereby, surrealistically silencing her, and, then, falls asleep. Nick Shadow plucks a marvelous machine out of Tom's dreams -- a device for converting stones to bread (it's a transparent fraud). Tom invests everything in the stone-to-bread apparatus, altruistically proclaiming that this will restore the world to a sort of paradise. In the next scene, Tom is bankrupt and all of his assets are being sold by a glitzy showman of an auctioneer -- this includes Baba's vast collection of curios, things like mummies and stuffed auks. Baba's cage headgear is lifted from her shoulders and she sings an impressively stormy aria about returning to the stage as a freak and performer -- this part of the opera seems to be about the cult of celebrity. Nick comes to collect on his debt -- the term on the contract has ended. For some reason, Nick agrees to a card game, offering Tom an escape from the agreement which now threatens the damnation of his soul. Mourning his loss of Ann, Tom has become sufficiently virtuous now to beat the devil at his own game -- Nick drops howling through the floor, descending to hell. (This part of the opera is influenced by the last scenes in Don Giovanni). Nick can't seize Tom's soul, but he has sufficient power to cloud his mind. Tom becomes insane and is confined in an asylum. Ann visits Tom who imagines himself as a Adonis (he thinks Ann is his queen, Venus). Ann sings a lullaby and Tom falls asleep once more, dying as a crowd of ragged, ghostly madmen wander around the stage singing morosely. Then, things brighten and the company gathers to sing the epilogue chorus stating the opera's moral which is obviously not its moral at all.
At the production that I saw, the singing was superb. The actor playing Nick Shadow, (Sam Carl) in particular, was fantastically accomplished -- his voice was deep, resonant, and menacing. The acoustics in the steep-sided oubliette of the Blank Performing Arts auditorium are excellent and, because the theater is small and intimate, it seems as if the singers are immediately and almost frighteningly present. The stage is a Tyrone Guthrie-style thrust, without a curtain. This presents problems for opera which often requires elaborate stage-craft with varied and elaborate scenery. In his production, the changes in setting are accomplished largely by costume -- the show was elaborately costumed with even the supernumeraries who have to haul furniture on and off-stage dressed in period livery. The rural environs of the opening scene are suggested by a car-sized mock-up of a Tudor farmhouse that hangs between two chandelier above the actors -- the farmhouse has windows that can be lit and a chimney that leaks actual smoke. In a later scene, when Tom is rich, a similarly sized Palladian villa hangs from the roof and its lighting panels. Some flats simulating a Wunderkabinett appear in the auction scene. The mad-scene with Tom and Ann is primarily defined by clinical white floodlights on the actors who are garbed in ragged white --Tom lies an a patch of straw strewn on the floor. At the center of the stage, the floorboards are split to reveal the orchestra below the action -- this imparts a sense of danger to the proceedings; you are always conscious that if someone loses their way, they could stray and fall through this hole dropping right off the stage into the orchestra under them. Baba the Turk is carried on-stage in brightly painted sedan. She has a little boy with her, a servant dressed as Turk and wearing a big turban -- this character doesn't appear in the libretto but, I think, derives from images of a similar figure in the Hogarth engravings. The production was excellent in all respects and the opera is thought-provoking and highly intelligent --I heard people speculating as to its meaning at the intermission and after the show when I walked through shadowy campus to the parking lot. Somehow, the colossal line of thunderstorms passed overhead without so much as a drop of rain falling in Indianola. The night remained, humid and sultry with scarcely any breeze at all.
The Blank Center for the Performing Arts has 457 seats. The seats literally hang over the stage which is at the bottom of an extremely steep-sided auditorium. You look down onto the singers and the people in the front row seats on the three sides of the thrust stage have their feet on the stage itself. The place isn't handicapped accessible by any stretch of the imagination, all rows of seats are stacked on top of one another and there are no level aisles anywhere in the house. The people who attend opera are long in the tooth and, often, frail and many of the patrons were using canes or walkers, and I must say I was very fearful as I watched these elderly people scale or descend the Maya-Pyramid stairways in the house.
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