The Rake's Progress Judith Raskin as Ann and John Reardon as Nick Shadow, is from London 1964 and is conducted by Stravinsky himself. It is currently available on the Sony/BMG 22-CD box set "Works of Igor Stravinsky". Sources The Rake's Progress The Rake's Progress is an English-language opera in three acts and an epilogue by Igor Stravinsky. The libretto, written by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, is based loosely on the eight paintings and engravings "A Rake's Progress" (1733–1735) of William Hogarth, which Stravinsky had seen on 2 May 1947, in a Chicago exhibition. The story concerns the decline and fall of
Marriage A-la-Mode (Hogarth) the engraver views it in a mirror as he undertakes the engraving. Hogarth was an engraver himself and disliked this course of action using mirrors, so unusually, he produced the paintings for Marriage à-la-mode already reversed so the engraver could directly copy them. It would normally be expected to view the series of prints moving from left to right and Hogarth would have taken this into account when composing the original paintings. Commentators have used a variety of names for the individual paintings, but as the paintings are presently in the National Gallery the names used there are used here.