Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.“For, so it please, there’s no fantastic lie/You cannot make men swallow if you try,” sings Nick Shadow. Back in 1951, penning Stravinsky’s text, WH Auden predicted a hellish reality of alternative facts. The Rake’s Progress has something few operas today can boast — a superlative libretto. Auden is clever and dark and funny and to the point.Perhaps the perennial relevance of the text inspired the Paris Opera’s decision to revive Olivier Py’s 2008 production for a world in which most of society seems to have followed Tom Rakewell’s lead and made demonic pacts of one kind or another — with big data or corrupt governance or fake news or other forms of moral turpitude, all for a few moments as top dog, some hanky-panky, or some shiny new possessions. Stravinsky’s hero first lost his way in William Hogarth’s magnificently cautionary 1730s storyboard, painted and later published as a series of etchings. Auden and Stravinsky saw the tale as startlingly contemporary, and together they created a biting work.Not that Py’s production is particularly bitey. With its slick imagery and old-man eroticism (lots of bare breasts and torsos, plenty of homoerotic subplots for the supernumeraries), it hasn’t aged well. The biggest draw-cards for this dusting-off are Golda Schultz as Anne Trulove and Jamie Barton making her Paris Opera debut as Baba the Turk. Amid the fluff and feathers, Schultz manages to give an insipid role remarkable depth and dimension. Her Trulove is impassioned and intelligent, and somehow, despite her victim status, seems always in charge of her destiny. When she shows compassion for Baba, for whom Tom jilts her, the gesture has stature — not least because Barton also owns her role with a rare kind of confidence, a kind of here-I-am manner of occupying space that deprives the character of all the ridicule and objectification that normally make it so problematic (Baba is quite literally auctioned off with the furniture). Having two such strong women share the stage mitigates the production’s countless carelessly #MeToo moments.A third strong woman is running the show. Susanna Mälkki conducts with calm assurance, keeping everything together with meticulous care. Yet the orchestra sounds out of sorts and the score never really finds drive or direction. Pierre Boulez dismissed neoclassicism as a dead end; perhaps he was right.Despite the excellent women, an appealing Tom Rakewell from Ben Bliss and a gruffly camp Nick Shadow from Iain Paterson, the evening plods along grimly for three hours, only igniting for occasional moments of sweet lyricism, most of them when Golda Schultz is singing. ★★★☆☆To December 23, operadeparis.fr/en
