The Rake's Progress Teachers Guide - San Francisco Opera

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Stravinsky continued to live in the United States from 1939 until his death in 1971; he became a naturalized citizen in 1945. Stravinsky had adapted to life in France, but moving to America at the age of 58 was a very different prospect. For a time, he preserved a ring of emigré Russian friends and contacts, but eventually realized that this would not sustain his intellectual and professional life in the US. He was drawn to the growing cultural life of Los Angeles, especially during World War II, when so many writers, musicians, composers, and conductors settled in the area; he settled in Beverly Hills and sometimes conducted concerts at the famous Hollywood Bowl as well as throughout the U.S. When he planned to write an opera with W. H. Auden, the need to acquire more familiarity with the Englishspeaking world coincided with his meeting the conductor and musicologist Robert Craft. Craft lived with Stravinsky until the composer's death, acting as interpreter, chronicler, assistant conductor, and factotum for countless musical and social tasks. In 1962, he accepted an invitation to return to St. Petersburg (then known as Leningrad) for a series of concerts. While there he spent more than two hours speaking with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who urged him to return to the Soviet Union. Despite the invitation, Stravinsky remained an émigré firmly based in the West. In the last few years of his life, Stravinsky lived at Essex House in New York City. Grave of Stravinsky in San Michele He died at the age of 88 in New York City and was buried in Venice on the cemetery island of San Michele. His grave is close to the tomb of his long-time collaborator Diaghilev. Stravinsky's life had encompassed most of the 20th century, including many of its modern classical music styles, and he influenced composers both during and after his lifetime. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6340 Hollywood Boulevard and posthumously received the Grammy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1987. 20
W.H. Auden Wystan Hugh Auden (21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973) who signed his works W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet, regarded by many as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievements, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form, and content. The central themes of his poetry are: personal love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature. Auden grew up in Birmingham in a professional middle-class family and read English Literature at Oxford. His early poems, in the late 1920s and 1930s, alternated between obscure modern styles and accessible traditional ones, were written in an intense and dramatic tone, and established his reputation as a left-wing political poet and prophet. He became uncomfortable in this role in the later 1930s, and abandoned it after he moved to the United States in 1939. His poems in the 1940s explored religious and ethical themes in a less dramatic manner than his earlier works, but still combined new forms devised by Auden himself with traditional forms and styles. In the 1950s and 1960s many of his poems focused on the ways in which words revealed and concealed emotions, and he took a particular interest in writing opera librettos, a form ideally suited to direct expression of strong feelings. He was also a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological, and religious subjects, and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays, and other forms of performance. Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential. After his death, some of his poems, notably "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks") and "September 1, 1939", became widely known through films, broadcasts, and popular media. Auden published about four hundred poems, including seven long poems (two of them book-length). His poetry was encyclopedic in scope and method, ranging in style from obscure twentieth-century modernism to the lucid traditional forms such as ballads and limericks, from doggerel through haiku and villanelles to a "Christmas Oratorio" and a baroque eclogue in Anglo-Saxon meters. The tone and content of his poems ranged from pop-song clichés to complex philosophical meditations, from the corns on his toes to atoms and stars, from contemporary crises to the evolution of society. 21
Page 1: The Rake’s Progress San Francisco
Page 4 and 5: Many thanks to the proud sponsors o
Page 7: Table of Contents A Short Introduct
Page 11 and 12: Opera Glossary Accompaniment - An i
Page 13 and 14: Libretto - Literally “little book
Page 15 and 16: Operatic Voices Operatic singing de
Page 17 and 18: Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (June 1
Page 19: Stravinsky and Pablo Picasso collab
Page 23 and 24: Once upon a time… The Story of Th
Page 25 and 26: William Hogarth (November 10, 1697
Page 27 and 28: Plate 3 — The Tavern Scene Plate
Page 29 and 30: Plate 7 — The Prison Scene Plate
Page 31 and 32: Bedlam The Bethlem Royal Hospital o
Page 33 and 34: The Five C’s Using the Five C’s
Page 35 and 36: 7. What obstacles are beyond your c
Page 37 and 38: New Endings Summary of Activity Fol
Page 39 and 40: Other Graphic Art Ancient cave pain
Page 41 and 42: Audience Etiquette The following li
Page 43 and 44: The Publications Coordinator then g
Page 45 and 46: The Lighting Designer works with th
Page 47 and 48: Questions and Activities In general
Page 49 and 50: Opera and the California State Fram
Page 51 and 52: SAN FRANCISCO OPERA EDUCATION DEPAR
Page 53: Do you have additional comments/sug

The Rake's Progress Teachers Guide - San Francisco Opera

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