The Rake's Progress.

In his wise and thought-provoking book Poetics of Music, Igor Stravinsky makes this statement: "I maintain that there is more substance and true invention in [Verdi's] aria |La donna e mobile,' for example .. than in the rhetoric and vociferation of [Wagner's] Ring." And he quotes Baudelaire, "Rhetorics and prosodies are not arbitrarily invented tyrannies ... and never have [they] kept originality from fully manifesting itself. The contrary, that is to say, that they have aided the flowering of originality, would be infinitely more true."

In an appraisal of Stravinsky's work, those two quotations explain much. For in Le Sacre du Printemps and his subsequent compositions, he was always guided by the need for the clarity which order, discipline, and prosody demand of music. Here was a composer who, pushing his way through modernism and postmodernism, arrived at a synthesis of his own, which included elements of both classicism and the baroque plus the meters and voices of his own times. It makes us wonder what those who fumed and cursed at his work could have been thinking when they tried to dismiss him as wild or incoherent. It would, in fact, have been more accurate to say that in his composing, Stravinsky sometimes seemed closer to the not-yet-invented computer than to dreams of musical revolution. The sense of form - which is different from form itself - pervades everything he wrote, and gives it the vitality and freedom it possesses.

How true this is becomes apparent in new recordings by Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Orchestra of Le Sacre, L'Oiseau de Feu, and Petrushka - works of different levels of intensity - and of Pulcinella (coupled with Kurt Weill's Seven Deadly Sins), all issued by EMI. Mr. Rattle and the orchestra he in effect created play with a drive and excitement that was somewhat lacking in Stravinsky's own more studious traversals of works.

But the real news will be read in a recording of The Rake's Progress, an opera that holds even those like myself, whose mind begins to wander when the recitativo usurps the disc. The libretto is by W. H. Auden, who imposed his plot on the drawings of Hogarth, and whose own sense of form is wedded to that of the composer.

When Rake premiered in Washington in the late 1950s, I was one of a small group that met with Auden and listened as he discussed the problems of writing words which are to be set to music or music which must be set to words. His awe at having been selected by Stravinsky to write the words on which the opera would rest was both surprising and touching. But he was most impressed by the dazzling affirmation, and the lyricism, with which Stravinsky captured the spirit and idiom of Hogarth's times, without writing in Purcellian phrases. The substance and true invention, and the prosody, were in his hand. In this recording, issued by EMI, Stravinsky conducted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Sadler's Wells Opera Chorus more powerfully than he had in his performances of his orchestral work.