his musical conscience a position he was to retain, to the incalculable benefit of Stravinsky's music, but to the fury of many of his friends, old and new, whom Craft displaced or otherwise discomfited, until the composer's death in 1971. This is not the place for a detailed investigation of Craft's role in Stravinsky's domestic life. Certainly it was enormous, and by no means always placid. For the present purposes it can be subsumed under two headings: cultural and compositional. Compositionally, as we shall see, Craft guided Stravinsky into new waters, technically and aesthetically, and it is no exaggeration to say that without his influence the music after 1951 would have been radically different, perhaps (though of course not certainly) much less vital. Culturally, he transformed Stravinsky's thinking. Hitherto, the focus had been Russian and French; now it became Anglo-Saxon. Craft, by his own description a monoglot New Yorker, instinctively pulled Stravinsky towards English and American literature and philosophy, and towards that American view of things in general which had been so signally absent from the Stravinskys' life since their arrival in the country. Out went the collected Voltaire, in came the complete Henry James. No doubt the transformation was less than total (Craft has said that Stravinsky continued to read Bossuet every day). But it was Craft's practical value as a cultured Anglophone that immediately commended him to the composer, who was at that moment embarking on an English-language opera with a notoriously eccentric and verbally punctilious English poet as librettist. The idea for The Rake's Progress arose from a Hogarth exhibition Stravinsky saw in Chicago in May 1947, and by the time W.H. Auden was co-opted as librettist that autumn, Stravinsky had formed clear ideas of the sort of work he wanted to write. Influences would include Mozart, whose opera scores he requested from Hawkes even before Auden came to Los Angeles for consultations in November 1947. From the start Auden and his co-librettist Chester Kallman understood Stravinsky's need for formal structures, in this case arias and recitatives, strict rhyming and metric schemes, and a high degree of symbolic focus in the narrative. Auden could combine these mechanical functions with the invention of verse of astonishing verbal plasticity and richness. Yet (a crucial virtue in a Stravinsky collaborator) he was apparently untroubled by the composer's sometimes wilful treatment of accent, which was presumably deliberate, since Craft was there to advise him on the correct prosody. On the whole, Auden's rethinking of antique verse forms and patterns is very close to the musical equivalents in Stravinsky's own work, and even the elements of stylization are parallel, which is why the outcome whatever the work's dramatic or musical shortcomings is linguistically, in the broadest sense, so harmonious. The Rake's Progress has been criticized as musically too predictable, too much the grand master's summatory neo-classical masterpiece, with its recipe of arias and recitatives (with harpsichord though a piano was used in the first production) and its rather obvious Mozartisms, suitably coarsened, since this is Hogarth, by a flavour of The Beggar's Opera. It