The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (68 page)

CD: Peter Pears (Albeit); Benjamin Britten (cond.).
Decca 421 849 2

Billy
Budd

Four or two acts. First performed London, 1951.

Libretto by E. M. Forster and Eric Crozier

Based on the novella by Herman Melville, this was Britten’s first ‘grand’ opera, also notable for its exclusively male cast.
Broadly speaking, E.
M.
Forster was responsible for the monologues in the libretto, while Crozier worked on the dialogues and stage directions.

In 1961, Britten revised the score, compressing the original four acts into two – the major changes included the elimination of the finale to Act I and a new finale to Act II.
In recent years, however, the original four-act version has been successfully revived, and the gains and losses are now regarded as being equally spread between the alternatives.
The opera has enjoyed an extraordinary surge in popularity over the last decade, and is now virtually standard repertory in many major houses throughout Europe and North America.

Plot

The action takes place on board the
Indomitable,
a British man o’ war, during the early years of the war against Napoleon.
Billy Budd is one of several press-ganged recruits: a handsome, enthusiastic lad with a stammer, he is delighted to serve a great cause under the noble, reflective and highly civilized Captain Vere.
But Claggart, a sinister officer with a psychotic grudge against innocence and beauty, resolves to bring about Billy’s downfall.
Billy refuses to heed warnings against Claggart’s malevolence and fails to understand the significance of an attempt, set up by Claggart, to bribe him to join a mutiny.

A French ship is sighted, but, to the crew’s frustration, mists fall and prevent an engagement.
Claggart blackens Billy’s name.
The sceptical Vere summons Billy, who believes he is about to be promoted.
When he hears Claggart’s accusations, Billy stammers and instinctively lashes out at Claggart, who is killed by the blow.
Under naval law, Vere is obliged to sentence Billy to death, even though he knows in his heart that Billy was good and Claggart evil.
Billy accepts his fate uncomplainingly, but when he is hanged from the yardarm, the ship’s crew rises in spontaneous mutiny, which the officers quell.
In an epilogue, the elderly Vere looks back and reflects on Billy’s redemptive example.

What to listen for

The libretto’s moral ambiguities are embodied in the way in which the music constantly vacillates between two keys or two notes a semitone apart – a movement which also suggests the ship rocking on the sea.
Although there are some fine set-pieces for the principals – a monologue in which Claggart exposes his need to destroy ‘beauty, handsomeness, goodness’, for example, or Billy’s touchingly ardent and sincere aria as he awaits hanging – it is for its big ensembles that the opera is most notable.
These may be relatively simple (the sea shanties) or more dramatically tense and complex, as in the scenes of the failed engagement with the French which open the second half of the opera, or the scene of Billy’s hanging and its aftermath.
Note the way that the melodic motif associated with the ‘Rights’ o’ man’ motif recurs throughout the opera, and also the extraordinary sequence of thirty-four
simple chords, all based in one key, which through their modulations of dynamics and harmonic and instrumental colour graphically tell the inner and outer story of Vere’s final interview with Billy.

In performance

Billy
Budd
touches on large metaphysical issues – the unmotivated existence of good and evil, the incompatibility of human and divine justice, the paradoxical guilt of the innocent and innocence of the guilty – and on the printed page can look pretentious.
On stage, however, the sheer theatricality of the plot and the conflicts it embodies carries it along, and one notices how teenagers and those with no prior interest in opera invariably find it enthralling, especially when the different levels of the ship are presented as spectacularly as they are in John Dexter’s production at the Met.
It’s important that the characters all look physically convincing – a handsome blond Billy (baritone), a sinister, spidery Claggart (bass) and a Vere (tenor) whose fine upstanding demeanour disguises his vacillating conscience.
Productions sometimes fall down by their failure to drill the cast into giving a convincing impression of naval discipline, and Vere’s disguise as an old man for the prologue and epilogue can cause unintentional hilarity.

This is the most blatantly homosexual of Britten’s operas, and several directors, homosexual themselves, tend to camp up the infatuation of Claggart and Vere with the beautiful but unattainable Billy.

Recordings

CD: Simon Keenlyside (Billy); Philip Langridge (Vere); Richard Hickox (cond.).
Chandos CHAN 9826

Video: Thomas Allen (Billy); Philip Langridge (Vere); Mark Elder (cond.).
ENO production.
Universal 079 2213

The
Turn
of
the
Screw

Two acts. First performed Venice, 1954.

Libretto by Myfanwy Piper

Based on the novella by Henry James, this immaculately composed and dramatically gripping chamber work is one of the most admired of post-war operas and has some claim to be the supreme masterpiece among Britten’s theatrical works.

Plot

A nameless Governess arrives at a remote country house to look after two orphaned children, Flora and her younger brother Miles.
She is apprehensive, having been specifically asked by their guardian not to consult him under any circumstances once she has taken up the post.
At first the children seem delightful, and the Governess befriends the sensible housekeeper Mrs Grose.
But then news comes that Miles has been disgracefully expelled from school – quite why is not clear.
The Governess is incredulous.
One evening, walking alone in the grounds, she sees an eerily vanishing man on the roof of the house.
Later she describes the figure to Mrs Grose, who identifies him as the sinister Peter Quint, formerly a servant in the house, whose violent love affair with the Governess’s predecessor, Miss Jessel, resulted in both their deaths and who was suspected of a malign influence over the children.
The Governess passionately vows to protect the children from the ghosts who seem to want to possess them.

Miles becomes worryingly dreamy and
distrait,
and the Governess is further alarmed when she sees the apparition of Miss Jessel watching Flora from the other side of a lake.
At night, the voices of Quint and Miss Jessel summon the children – until they are interrupted by the arrival of the Governess and Mrs Grose.

The Governess comes face to face with the ghost of Miss Jessel in the schoolroom and decides that she must risk breaking the terms of her employment by writing of her concerns to
the children’s guardian (with whom she may be infatuated).
The Governess then attempts to wring the truth out of Miles, but he resists, still haunted by Quint’s alluring voice and its injunctions.
Quint also persuades Miles to steal the Governess’s letter before it is posted.
The Governess becomes convinced that Flora, bewitched by Miss Jessel, has grown to hate her, and Mrs Grose reports how Flora has poured out shocking profanities in her sleep.
The Governess agrees that Mrs Grose should take Flora to her guardian, leaving the Governess alone with Miles.
A final battle for Miles’s soul ensues.
The Governess questions him about the theft of the letter, and as he is on the verge of a confession, he shouts out ‘Peter Quint, you devil!’ (the first time he has uttered his name).
The Governess is briefly exultant, believing that his cry indicates that she has triumphed, but then realizes it has cost the boy his life – he lies dead in her arms.

What to listen for

A twelve-note theme – fifteen variations on which link each scene to the next like so many ‘turns of the screw’ – forms the musical basis of this taut and schematic opera.
Britten draws an astonishing range of colour and sonorities out of a chamber ensemble similar to that used in
The
Rape
of Lucretia.