The Rake's Progress: 'Come, master, observe the host of mankind' | Glyndebourne

Matthew Rose (Nick Shadow) performs 'Come, master, observe the host of mankind' from Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress.
Recorded live at Glyndebourne Opera House, Festival 2010.
Cast includes:
Tom Rakewell: Topi Lehtipuu
Nick Shadow: Matthew Rose
Anne Trulove: Miah Persson
Baba the Turk: Elena Manistina
Father Trulove: Clive Bayley
Mother Goose: Susan Gorton
Sellem: Graham Clark
Madhouse Keeper: Duncan Rock
Production Team:
Conductor:Vladimir Jurowski
Director: John Cox
Designer: David Hockney
Lighting Designer: Robert Bryan
Assistant Director: Bruno Ravella
London Philharmonic Orchestra
The Glyndebourne Chorus: Chorus Master Jeremy Bines

[@AndrewRudin]

Stravinsky, certainly not a native English-speaker, puts to shame the like of most American opera composers.

[@ronginther1986]

Years, decades ago, I played library records of the opera in my college dorm room in an aged building reserved for veterans. Anyone hearing the music through the transom must have thought I had gone mad. No, maybe half-mad but not fully. I thought it a morality play in progress. In that respect it felt reassuring to me amidst the moral anarchy of the drugged Seventies and the Sexual Revolution. I was so naive! I still believed in right and wrong in the midst of a bubbling, toxic, witches' pot of relativism. Auden and Stravinsky, on the contrary, had gone stark raving mad. They no doubt are now hung upside down having their toes and buttocks toasted by Mephistopheles with flames jetting like a blow-torch from his soot-blackened mouth. Justice served!

[@marichristian1072]

Libretto by W H Auden. Sets and costumes designed by David Hockney. A fabulous opera experience.

[@treesny]

Libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman. They also collaborated on English performing translations (The Magic Flute, Rise & Fall of the City of Mahagonny, The 7 Deadly Sins) and other original libretti, notably for Hans Werner Henze (Elegy for Young Lovers, The Bassarids) and Nicolas Nabokov (Love's Labour's Lost). I really wish people would stop trying to expunge Kallman from Auden's work and (by extension) his life. Thank you.

[@jamesa0330]

Exemplary diction. Legendary production.

[@StadinBasso]

Wunderbar!