Billy Budd is 70 years old |Opera forum

Billy Budd by Benjamin Britten celebrates his 70th birthday on December 1st. The opportunity to exhume from our archives a file that still serves as a reference today.


Billy Budd

Opera in two acts, op. 50 Music by Benjamin Britten Libretto by E.M Forster and Eric Crozier Based on the short story by Herman Melville: Billy Budd, Sailor. An Inside narrative. Version in four acts created on December 1, 1951 Version (final) in two acts created on January 9, 1964

Characters

* Edward Fairfax Vere, Captain of H.M.S. “The Indomitable” – tenor * Billy Budd, foreman – baritone * John Claggart, fencing master – bass * Mr. Redburn, mate – baritone * Mr. Flint, boatmaster – bass-baritone * Lieutenant Ratcliffe – bass * Red Whiskers, Seaman – tenor * Donald, Seaman – baritone * Dansker, Old Seaman – bass * The Novice – tenor * Squeak, Corporal-at-Arms – tenor * Bosun – baritone * The Chief Petty Officer – baritone * Le Second Maître – baritone * La Grand'hune – tenor * L'Ami du Novice – baritone * Arthur Jones, conscripted sailor – baritone * Quatre ensigns – boys' voice * Un Mousse – spoken voice * Officers, sailors, Gargoussiers, Drummers, Marines (choirs)

Composition of the orchestra

4 flutes (including piccolos) 2 oboes, English horn 2 clarinets (including an E-flat clarinet) 2 bass clarinets alto saxophone 2 bassoons, contrabassoon 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba timpani, percussion (6 musicians) harp strings


Argument

Prologue

Captain Edward Fairfax Vere takes stock of his life spent in the service of his King and his Country and concludes that Man is inherently malignant, Evil leaving its imprint at the very heart of Goodness. He also wonders about his role during incidents that occurred in 1797, during the Napoleonic wars, aboard the “Indomptable”.

Act I

Scene 1

Roughed by the officers, the crew tries to brick the deck of the ship. But the Novice, too concentrated on his work, multiplies the clumsiness by jostling the boatswain, then stumbling and falling. The sanction is implacable: it will be twenty lashes. Three sailors from the “Rights o' Man” (the “Droits de l'Homme”), a merchant ship, board the warship. Questioned bluntly by the master-at-arms, these civilians enlisted by force inspire only contempt in the Officers. On the other hand, a young and very strong, playful and of an extraordinary beauty, delights them unanimously, in spite of a small imperfection: under the influence of a too strong emotion, Billy Budd begins to stutter. However, they are gloomy when the Handsome Sailor turns to his companions and launches a vibrant farewell to "Human Rights". These hated words earned him the mistrust of the officers who asked the master-at-arms to watch him closely. Claggart entrusts the mission to his right-hand man, Corporal Squeak, responsible for tailing the new topman and putting him to the test.

The Novice reappears, broken and ashamed. A few men try to comfort him, but more experienced sailors, Donald and Dansker, explain to the newcomers that everyone ends up spending a day there. In the meantime, Claggart approaches, apostrophizes Billy and corrects his outfit by gently lecturing him. As he retires, the old sea dogs recommend to all the greatest distrust of him, then sing the praises of the brave and brilliant captain. Billy ignites for this Starry Vere ("Starry Vere") and swears loyalty to him even in death.

Scene 2

[A week later, evening.] The Captain is having a drink in his cabin with two of his officers. The coasts of Finistère will soon be in sight and the confrontation is imminent. The men let off steam in a couplet hostile to the French while the Captain evokes the taboo danger of mutiny. The Boatswain's Officer reveals his suspicions with regard to Billy, but the Captain reassures him, arguing about his youthful ardor, and recalls that only the happiness of men can ward off the specter of sedition.

Scene 3

The sailors sing an old sailor song in canon and Billy joins them. But Dansker stands aside. “Baby Budd” questions him and goes to get him “the only pleasure he has left”: a chew. He falls on the corporal-at-arms, busy rummaging through his belongings and a violent fight breaks out. "Beauty" was quick to put him down when Claggart appeared. He has the villain taken away before he has time to betray him, compliments Billy and sends the men to bed. Alone on stage, the master-at-arms reveals the extreme turmoil that Billy has thrown into his life, but brushes it aside with rare violence ("Hate and Envy Make Me Stronger Than Love"), promising himself to destroy, body and soul, the Beau Marin. He sends the Novice to bribe Billy with gold. Emerging from a nightmare where he sees himself at the bottom of the ocean, Billy is slow to understand what the boy wants from him. When he realizes what is asked of him, he begins to stutter, clenches his fists in rage and the Novice runs away, terrified. Awakened by the noise, Dansker comes to the news and tries to convince a still disbelieving Billy of the master-at-arms' malevolence.

Act II

Scene 1

Contemplating the mist, Captain Vere expresses the wish that the action finally begins. Claggart comes to tell him of a danger that threatens the ship, but he is interrupted by the cry of the mainmast which has just spotted a ship flying the French flag. The sailors rush to their post, Billy accompanies the volunteers for the boarding "in the smoke" and the chase begins. In a hurry to do battle, the men stamp with impatience. A first cannon fire sounds, but in vain: the wind drops and the mist re-forms, favorable to the enemy ship. The crew give up the fight, heartbroken. A leaden yoke falls on the ship. Claggart calls out to the Captain again, annoyed, and accuses Billy of fomenting a mutiny. Skeptical and snappy, Vere warns him against false testimony, questions the evidence put forward by the master-at-arms and calls Billy. The informer withdraws.

Scene 2

Vere recognizes Claggart as the embodiment of evil and is determined not to be deceived. Billy arrives, jovial, believing that a promotion will be announced to him. But Claggart joins them and hammers his accusation four times, not taking his eyes off the young sailor. Sputtering and unable to articulate the beginning of an answer, Billy leaps like a beast and unleashes a formidable punch. Hit in the forehead, the one who had sworn his loss collapses, under the dismayed gaze of the captain (“The angel of God has struck, and the angel must be hanged”). He knows he will have to answer for his actions himself...

He summons the officers, torn between anger and sympathy for Billy, and sets up a tribunal. Billy claims his loyalty and exposes a lie, but he is unable to explain it. He implores, three times, the help of the Captain, but in vain; the latter also refuses to help the judges, overwhelmed by the situation. The verdict falls and Vere accepts it, yet aware of his iniquity.

Scene 3

Awaiting his execution, Billy sings a ballad that is both sinister and poignant. Dansker brings him his last meal and tells him that sailors want to prevent his execution. Resigned and serene, Billy rejects this prospect. He promises to watch over the captain and thinks of this hope glimpsed in the distance, "this sail which shines over there and which is not Fatality." »

Scene 4

Everyone silently watches Billy's last moments. Before being hoisted to the top of the main yard, he blesses the captain and the men repeat this redemptive word. However, the Beau Marin's last breath is followed by a growing rumor where there is no revolt, but the bridge is evacuated. As the men slowly obey orders and begin to disperse, the light gradually wanes.

Epilogue

The scene gradually brightens to reveal the elderly Captain Vere, as in the Prologue. Haunted by the memory of Billy, he tells himself that he could have saved him, but the last words of the young man have brought him peace and he, too, perceives “the sail which shines over there. »


Introduction

“The more vicious the society, the more vicious the individual. »Benjamin Britten

"I feel no attraction [sic] or sympathy either for his music, quite conservative and more skilful than profound, or for some of the subjects treated, with their perverse attraction for threatened childish innocence, even for a homosexuality with sadistic tendencies (Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, Le Tour d'Ecrou and even the ultimate Death in Venice) [...]» (1) I do not feel like discussing the notions of " musical depth or artistic "progress" with Harry Halbreich. Nor is it for the pleasure of polemicizing that I quote this condemnation of Britten's principal lyrical masterpieces in the name of morality. Admittedly, on the part of a recognized specialist in twentieth-century music, this trial of intent is surprising; but it has the merit, in my opinion, of shedding light on the uneasiness that a more or less significant section of the public may feel when faced with Britten's universe. The problem is not new: an overly realistic depiction of vice, a fine and deep, even empathetic understanding of Evil, has always aroused suspicion, especially when the end of the story is not moral. This is how Britten's attachment to tormented and often marginal figures passes for a sadomasochistic and inevitably “perverse” complacency. Add a pinch of equivocation, particularly sexual, gray areas and a few questions left unanswered, and you will offend enough against common sense to cut yourself off from the general public, if not from criticism.

Beyond this misunderstanding, Britten disturbs those who glimpse the truly subversive scope of his operas and who recognize themselves: the majority imbued with their alleged normality – heterosexual (Billy Budd) or militarist (Albert Herring) –, conformists and obtuse (Peter Grimes), quick to judge and exclude the deviant, this fierce sailor, doubled by a poet with sibylline images and who passes for a madman, but of whom absolutely nothing proves that he is a child abuser. But what does his innocence matter: “He who distances himself from others allows his pride to reign. He who despises us, we will destroy him. We will put down his arrogance” proclaims the hateful crowd of villagers. Is it really childhood that is persecuted? Peter is different and does not hide his difference, which the majority cannot bear. Those who fantasize about Lolita and collect David Hamilton shots will probably not be the last to cry wolf after a performance of The Turn of the Screw or Death in Venice. Aren't Billy Budd and Claggart also, at bottom, outcasts condemned by earthly laws? Melville's early commentators believed his short story could be read as an acceptance of the injustice of the social order. Suffice to say that opera is even more difficult to reduce to this fatalistic reading. It is not an unhealthy delight that drives Britten to stage suffering, but the desire to denounce stigmatization, hypocrisy and social conformity. Subversive and moral – but a morality of the minority, deprived of the comfort of certainties and of the immanent legitimacy of the group – infinitely more stimulating for the intelligence than many (soap)-operas with hackneyed canvases and caricatural Manichaeism, the operas of Britten are disturbing because they give us an uncompromising image of human society, ironic and disenchanted.

Commissioned by the Festival of Britain, Billy Budd was born from the encounter, ultimately quite rare in opera, between a great writer (in the autumn of his career) and a brilliant young composer (on the threshold of maturity) : Edgard Morgan Forster (1879-1970), successful essayist and novelist (La Route des Indes, Chambre avec vue, Howard's End, With a view of the Arno, Maurice...) and Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), including the first lyrical masterpiece (Peter Grimes) had just consecrated the renaissance of opera in England. From a posthumous short story by the author of Moby Dick and with the help of Éric Crozier (1914-1994), already a librettist of Albert Herring and Let's Make an Opera, Forster created a violent, obscure drama and fascinating. Why does John Claggart want to destroy Billy Budd? Why doesn't Captain Vere save him? These two excruciating but fascinating questions torment the spectator who cannot come out unscathed from a performance of Billy Budd. He feels, even vaguely, that this opera presents much more than an allegory of the mutual destruction of Good and Evil. Britten is now in full possession of his means: he manages to translate the rarest affects, distills anguish, plays with our nerves and even manages to suggest the unspeakable (repressed desire). His musical language is ripe to face other challenges: the brilliant equivocation of Turn of the Screw, the subtle and deleterious atmospheres of Death in Venice.

I have given up on a detailed and systematic study of the opera, number by number. Indeed, this imposing work has already been done and, rather than paraphrase it unnecessarily, I prefer to recommend that you read Jean-François Boukobza's musico-dramatic commentary published by L'Avant-Scène Opéra (n°158). On the other hand, another perspective, just as captivating, is offered to us: to penetrate the laboratory of creation and discover how the librettists appropriate the story, concentrate and magnify its potentialities in a drama of rare density. I therefore invite you to dive into the heart of both the short story and the opera: the confrontation sheds light on their deep springs, these dangerous liaisons which have captivated Forster and Britten. Their precious testimonies as well as that of Peter Pears, the often penetrating remarks of William Auden and Mervin Cook will also enrich our understanding of the work. A brief presentation of the short story and its genesis (See below: Melville's Swan Song) will also be an opportunity to explain the symbolism attached to the names of the protagonists or certain choices made by the librettists, but also to summarily evoke another opera taken from Billy Budd which has sunk into oblivion. Analysis of the character of Billy reveals how his beauty is far from being anecdotal and secondary, although it is frequently neglected by the commentaries and the stagings of the work (In the beginning, Beauty: 1. "Billy Budd, king of the World!"). We will also see how Forster interpreted the character of Claggart, pushing his ambiguity as far as possible and endowing the opera with an incredibly modern meaning, barely glimpsed in Melville (In the beginning, Beauty: 2. A devil).Profoundly transformed by the librettists, the character of Vere constitutes the other enigma, perhaps even more disconcerting, of the opera (Starry Vere).Finally, I will evoke the originality of the language of Britten: this formidable game of mirrors between the tonalities and the protagonists which structures and innervates the score and which will later appear as the composer's signature (Britten's tonal symbolism) (2).


Melville's Swan Song


Billy Budd, An Inside Narrative, is dedicated to Jack Chase, a sailor whom Melville (1819-1891) befriended while serving on the United States between Honolulu and Boston, from August 1843 to October 1844. Melville was able to find in him the prototype of Billy: he was handsome and popular among the crew, but he also had a physical defect (a cut finger). Furthermore, this crossing with Chase was to provide Melville with the material for White-Jacket, or The World in a Man-of-War (1850). This novel is full of valuable information on the naval microcosm and already addresses issues dear to the writer that will reappear in Billy Budd: corporal punishment (whipping), conflicts with officers, martial law, forced recruitment of civilians, human rights, homosexuality or even the inappropriate irruption of religion (the chaplain) in an exclusively military context. Also, he offers a sketch of Claggart in the person of a malevolent arms master (Blant). In fact, this is a recurring figure in Melville: Jackson focuses his hatred on the young Redburn in the eponymous novel and, of course, in Moby Dick, the horrible Radney fiercely envies the handsome Steelkit.

However, it was not until 1886 that the embryo of what was to become the novelist's ultimate masterpiece was discovered. It has been nearly thirty years since the author of Moby Dick gave up a literary career, misunderstood and shunned by the public as well as by critics. However, that year, an inheritance freed him from an insipid livelihood at the Port of New York Customs. Melville then decides to take up a few unfinished poems, including a four-page sheet featuring the first version of "Balade de Billy aux fers" which will serve as the climax of the short story. A short prose commentary presents it as the monologue of a sailor "summarily sentenced at sea to be hanged for having been the leader of a nascent mutiny which it was feared would spread."

This draft mentions Billy's girlfriend, Bristol Molly, which prompted Antonio Ghedini (1892-1965) to create a female role in the one-act opera he based on Melville's short story. In fact, we also find a reference to Bristol Molly in one of the first sketches of Forster and Crozier's libretto, dated March 1949. For the record, you should know that Britten met Ghedini during a trip to Italy, without doubt in 1949 (the Italian version of Billy Budd was premiered at La Fenice in September 1949). Learning that he had been dubbed, Britten would have been so disconcerted that he would not have breathed a word of his own opera! Eric Crozier obtained a copy of the booklet made by Salvatore Quasimodo. In addition to a spoken role which performs the same function as that devolved to the chorus in Greek theater (to tell and describe the main lines of the story), the cast includes eight main roles. Billy is sung by a baritone, as with Britten, but it is a bass that interprets the role of Vere, while Claggart is entrusted to a tenor. Although Forster found the idea excellent, the librettists finally gave up evoking Molly Bristol, which is fully justified from a dramatic point of view: on the one hand, the absence of any feminine reference consecrates the ambiguous and sensual homo (already favored by male promiscuity) in which the opera evolves; on the other hand, it makes it possible to believe in Billy's virginity, a virginity which makes the young man the perfect incarnation of innocence.

In 1888, Melville decided to integrate Billy's ballad into a prose story that contained, for the most part, the outline of his short story: the mutineer had metamorphosed into a handsome sailor, young and innocent, and Melville unearthed his exact opposite, the black and evil Claggart. It is only in a third phase of writing, that the Narrator will penetrate the consciousness of the master-at-arms and above all that Captain Vere will take on new importance by becoming, thanks to the court-martial and the execution of Billy, the central figure of the drama. “Started Friday, November 16, 1888. End of book: April 19, 1891,” notes Melville. This is without counting the erasures, notes, additions, collages, abstruse scribbles and undecidable variants which will soon invade the manuscript to the point of discouraging the writer's widow. Billy Budd will slumber for twenty-eight years in an old trunk with other “unfinished” texts. It was his granddaughter who rediscovered it in the 1920s and entrusted its editing to Raymond Weaver, a brilliant defender of Melville's work.

As often with Melville, the names of the protagonists carry semes and connotations directly linked to their personality. In US English, "budd" is a colloquial word used to address a man or boy. In fact, it is the apocope of "buddy", alteration of "brother" used to speak of a little boy and, by extension, of a friend, of a "mate". Moreover, the term "budd" also designates the bud and the phenomenon of budding, but also an immature thing or being. Also, "budd" is the common name by which the Celts address the equivalent of the god Apollo. The terms that make up the captain's surname seem, for their part, marked at the corner of irony. "Vere" is a pun on "vir" and "veritas", while "Fairfax" can be read as a portmanteau of "fair facts". Moreover, "starry" means, in the literal sense, "starry", speaking of a sky of course, and "starry-eyed" means idealistic, innocent or bewildered... Finally, "claggart" is an invention de Melville from the obsolete verb "to clag", which means to remain glued to an object (concrete or abstract) without leaving it, in an unhealthy way. How could the fencing master be designated, if not by his obsession with the Beau Marin?

The librettists not only condensed the drama and deleted passages devoid of dramatic interest and impossible to transpose to the stage (politico-military digressions, psychological analyses...), they did a real job of rewriting. Take, for example, the episode where Billy overhears Squeak rummaging through his belongings: this invention of Forster and Crozier serves exactly the same function as the beating Billy gives to the nasty Red-Whiskers on his first ship, the "Rights of Man” (V.Au commence, la Beauté), it is a question of preparing us for the idea that the young man can use his impressive strength against men, but to defend himself and clear his honor. Two other incidents, briefly mentioned in the short story, are amplified and dramatized by the librettists. At Melville's, the Novice's flogging horrifies Billy and inspires him to behave beyond reproach; it becomes the only dramatic event at the start of the opera. Without this event and the extraordinary Sailors chorus in which the motif of revolt germinates ("O heave! O heave away, heave! heave!", poignant and at the same time threatening), the first scene of the opera, which more than thirty minutes, would become dangerously bogged down and could dull the listener's interest. From a purely dramatic point of view, this scene illustrates the cruel fate that overwhelms the crewmen and sets up the heavy and tense atmosphere of the opera. In this respect, the aborted battle breaks with this sinister atmosphere and introduces a climax conducive to revealing to us the frustration of the sailors.

Forster and Britten regard the Captain as the only real actor in the drama. The prologue and the epilogue obviously confirm his central position: the whole opera proceeds from his memories. But isn't this immense flashback biased by the Captain's conscience? Isn't it a reconstruction, necessarily subjective? Faced with a film or a novel, the question would not fail to be raised, but it has not been raised, to my knowledge, by opera commentators. Perhaps because its implications make you dizzy while the work is already generating its share of mysteries and insoluble questions. Anyway, the most important changes mainly affect his profile and, to a lesser extent, that of Claggart. As for Billy, you have to know how to go beyond the dazzle of appearances to discover its richness...


In the beginning, Beauty


“O grace, beauty, goodness, it is mine

to destroy you. (3) Billy Budd, Act II, Scene 2 (Vere)

“But this beauty, Phèdre [was] discovered through the senses, And the senses lead to passion, Phèdre, And passion to the abyss. »

Death inVenice, Act II, Scene 16

1. "Billy Budd, king of the world!" »

Underestimated, forgotten or deliberately evaded, the beauty of the sailor is often overlooked by critics who retain more of the goodness and innocence of the young sailor. Yet it is at the very heart of the drama. On this point, Melville is unequivocal. When Claggart discovers that Billy has spilled his bowl of soup on the deck and comments on his clumsiness by patting his back with his cane: “A fine worker, fine work! (4), the Narrator notes that "the master-at-arms had thereby let slip an ironic allusion (...) to what had been the primary reason for his hatred for Billy, namely the remarkable beauty of his person” (emphasis added) (5). Dominique Fernandez, however, does not hesitate to write that beauty "is only suggested as a secondary motive to explain the hatred of the fencing master" (6)! It makes you wonder if he has read the news. In the opera, Claggart leaves no doubt: “A discovery of great value, officer. A beauty. A jewel. The pearl among the pearls. And to reply, peremptorily, to the lieutenant who wishes to find many others like him: “There are no others like him, officer. I have seen many men, I have spent many years in His Majesty's service, sailed many seas. It's a king's market. While he slanders Billy, his beauty still obsesses him and he needs to talk about it, brazenly claiming that "the fine flower of masculine beauty and strength" ("I saw" seems approving the Captain according to an equivocation skillfully provoked by the overlapping of the replies) is a mask, "a trap hides under these lilies tinged with purple", all the more deceptive as the boy has a good character. He is still the one who calls Billy "a sweet pleasant fellow", a cute and brave little guy (7).

Billy Budd turns 70 | Opera Forum

If the libretto is more discreet than the short story, it's obviously because Billy's beauty must impose itself on stage. The sailors, starting with Dansker (the Dane), but also Claggart, call him "beauty", "baby" or "baby Budd", but do not compliment him. Her bearing, the admiration she arouses among the crew and to which the Narrator returns repeatedly throughout the story, cannot really be transposed to opera. Indeed, she can hardly express herself with so much insistence through the voice of the sailors, without risking to explain, but also to generalize the desire that the young man provokes and thus modify the meaning of the drama. The physical impact of the performer must suffice, as the creation in 1951 brilliantly demonstrated. “Well, you certainly look like Billy! admires Britten when he welcomed Theodor Uppman to London, who was to replace Geraint Evans, who was initially considered for the role (8). As for Forster, he is overflowing with enthusiasm: “The transatlantic Billy is still a bit slow with his notes, but he is learning them; on the other hand, he has a pretty voice, he is a handsome boy and he has a splendid physique (...)” (9). When discovering the photos of this mythical production, it is impossible not to think of the hero of Melville, solar and irresistible.

As soon as the recruiting lieutenant has set foot on "Les Droits de l'Homme", he swoops down on Billy, "as soon as he sees him on the gangway" and "even before that the crew had been assembled in good and due form on the quarterdeck to be deliberately inspected”. And it was the only one he chose. "Bitter, the captain pleads his case, he does not want to lose his "peacemaker" whose virtue has united the crew and who has even conquered, by beating him, the most quarrelsome of the men, “probably jealous of the newcomer”, “a charming, nice young fellow” (Claggart will use almost the same words to designate Billy). The lieutenant does not reconsider his decision. “But where is my beauty? he asked, looking out the open cabin door. Ah! here he comes, and, by way of Jupin, lugging his trunk... Apollo with his coat rack! ". "Heading back and looking up and down at the new find," the officer in charge of interrogating Billy, learning that he is a foundling, exclaims, "Well, that was apparently a nice find. . I hope we find others like you, the fleet needs them badly. In the opera, it is the first lieutenant, speaking to the maneuvering officer, who admires this "pretty find".

In reality, Billy's physique seduces and confuses everyone, unbeknownst to him. Certain notations are particularly suggestive in an exclusively male universe: “He no longer noticed the ambiguous smile that a je ne sais quoi in his physique brought to life on some of the roughest faces among the blue tunics. And he was no less unaware of the peculiarly favorable effect which his person and bearing produced on the more penetrating gentlemen in the quarterdeck. Captain Vere is not to be outdone: he admires in Billy "such a beautiful specimen of the genus homo, who, naked, could have posed for a statue of young Adam before the Fall" (Must we understand that Billy is is presented to the gaze in the simplest way?) and even thinks, for a moment, “of recommending him to his second in command so that he can promote him to a post that would allow him to observe him himself more frequently. We will of course come back to Claggart's "monomania", "which, like a subterranean fire, dug ever deeper into him", and drew its source from the radiant beauty of the boy.

But, beyond prestigious connections with David, Apollo or Hercules, what does Billy look like? “He was young [21 years old, we were told a little earlier]; and, though he had almost reached his full development, he looked even younger than he really had been, thanks to the adolescent expression that lingered on his still smooth face, the natural complexion of which was an almost feminine purity" and where, although the sea air had dissipated the lilies, "the bonfire that blazed in her heart lit up the rosy tan of her cheek". "Cast in a mold reserved for the finest physical specimens of these Englishmen in whom the Saxon fiber does not seem to be adulterated by any foreign contribution, Norman or otherwise, his face offered that expression of good human and serene nature that the Greek sculptor sometimes gave to his heroic athlete Hercules”, of which Billy, “built as a hero” possessed the “athletic frame”. The Narrator quotes the anecdote attributed to Gregory the Great who, before he became pope in 590, admired young Anglo-Saxon slaves "the strange beauty, so different from the Italian type with their fair and ruddy complexion and their hair curly linen" and would have asked: "Angles, what do you call them Angles? Is it because they look so much like angels? Finally, the Narrator remarks "the ear, small and well made, the arch of the foot, the curve of the mouth and that of the nostrils, even the hardened hand tinged with tawny orange like the beak of the toucans [...] , and above all something which, in the mobile expression as well as in every attitude and movement” betrayed “the nobility of his lineage (...) as manifest in him as in a thoroughbred. »

But didn't the story already open with the evocation of the Handsome Sailor once met "along the docks of any seaport", surrounded and adored by "a group of tanned sailors in exit" which combines "strength and grace, always attractive when they unite in a man" and of which Billy is ultimately only an avatar? The librettists have carefully read this preamble which places the short story under the aegis of masculine beauty. They also borrowed from the "black idol" of which the Narrator remembers "the two ends of a brightly colored handkerchief tied freely around his neck [which] danced on the ebony of his bare chest" to adorn Billy Budd's throat (V. A devil). And the account of these terrible events closes again on “the rare physical beauty of the young sailor, spiritualized now by his last experiences, so deeply poignant”. Billy shines even in death...

On a strictly dramatic level, Billy is probably not the hero of the opera, but his aura, both moral and physical, has a founding role, too quickly forgotten: it is she who first seduces the crew, dazzles fencing master John Claggart, precipitating the final double catastrophe. How many productions have not neglected this capital dimension? Admittedly, the booklet does not specify that Billy's rosy face is framed by adorable blond curls, but his youth is evoked at least twice and his beauty names him. How can we believe that the sturdy fellows of the Indomitable are softened for a "Baby" of forty-five years, who, moreover, easily looks five more (10)? Or that the sympathetic face, but puffy and without charms of Jochen Schmeckenbecher (Nancy, 1993) or more recently of Russel Braun (Toronto, 2001) can be unanimous and earn them the admiring nickname of “beauty”? "Billy has always attracted me, of course, as a young and radiant figure" (11) said Britten... Quick to mock the elephantine allure of certain divas in the roles of pretty young girls, the critics are much less loquacious when a tall, well-groomed booby (Thomas Hampson) bustles around in an oversized, starched sailor suit. Ridicule kills, but only dramatic verisimilitude... In the end, what matters most is the performer's grace, freshness and charisma. Dale Duesing and Simon Keenlyside probably don't look like supermodels, but their charm, their magnetism could have given the role its essential radiance.

Some may sneer, implying that these remarks are superficial. In any other context, the objection could be admissible, but certainly not here: like it or not, this opera revolves around a young man of extraordinary beauty - the case is undoubtedly unique in the history of the opera! - and bathes, moreover, in a homoerotic atmosphere, more or less perceptible according to the sensitivity of the spectators, but undeniable. Over the past ten years, several productions have not hesitated to exploit the character's erotic potential, sometimes to the detriment of his ingenuity, by stripping the sculptural forms of stocky and sexy young singers like Nathan Gunn or Rodney Gilfry (" the Beau Marin was also more or less a boxer or a powerful wrestler” writes Melville). Chosen to create the character of Kowalsi in the opera that André Prévin drew from A Streetcar Named Desire, Rodney Gilfry has enough assets to face the vivid memory of a Marlon Brando with explosive sensuality (the Kazan film dates from 1951, like Billy Budd). For his part, Bo Skovhus now has the wisdom to give up the role of Billy, which he has defended magnificently since 1984 and which he still held this season in Paris, because he is aware of having passed the age to play the young first.

On the other hand, to make homosexuality the key to Billy Budd would be to betray the richness of a plural, open and irreducible work. Especially since certain homosexual allusions present in the short story are not transposed to the opera: thus the ambiguous gaze of the sailors or the idea, expressed by Vere, that Billy could pose naked. Similarly, should we follow Mervin Cook when he claims to flush out homosexual symbolism in the very unsubtle puns he attributes to Melville? When he discovers Billy's clumsiness in spilling his soup on the freshly scrubbed deck, Claggart stops and seems about to say something acerbic to the sailor, which Melville says in these terms: "pausing, he was about to ejaculate something hasty to the sailor"... The musicologist thinks he has discovered another "powerful sex symbol" when Billy's body, hanging, is not traversed by any spasm, but Captain Vere stands "erectly rigid as a musket”. Personally, I will not follow him on this hazardous ground. Curiously, in the opera, Mervin Cook seems to miss Claggart's crucial monologue and concludes that "the homosexual implications are significantly toned down in the libretto". On the other hand, he defines well the interaction and the subtle balance of the webs of meaning at work in Billy Budd "[homosexual implications] are never very far from the surface and, without them, the parable of good and evil would be considerably weakened” (12).

Billy's beauty, like his kindness, is also a reflection of his inner nature and takes on a metaphysical significance that commentators hardly seem to glimpse. It is however impossible, listening to Billy Budd, not to think of Death in Venice, an intimate opera, undoubtedly Britten's most autobiographical and perhaps his testament. Long before Tadzio, Billy embodied in the composer's eyes the fatal, destructive character of beauty. "He who has contemplated beauty is already destined for death", writes August von Platen. Like Claggart, Aschenbach is gnawed by an inextinguishable thirst, the “Sehnsucht”, this need for the absolute which seizes us and does not let us go, when our gaze has crossed Perfection. But the poet gives up, plunges into the "golden gaze" (Pyper/Britten) of the ephebe, abandons himself and discovers "rest in perfection, the dream of one who struggles to achieve excellence", "voluptuous of annihilation" according to the very beautiful expression of Thomas Mann.

Far from providing him with this appeasement, the revelation of which Claggart is the only witness delivers him to the demon of envy. “The one that Claggart harbored was not a vulgar form of this passion. And, directed against Billy Budd, it was not part of that fearful jealousy that clouded Saul's face when his troubled thoughts rolled over to the young and handsome David. If he looked askance at Billy's good looks, cheerful good health and frank, youthful joie de vivre, it was because they went hand in hand with a nature which, Claggart felt magnetically, had never in its simplicity willed evil nor ever suffered the bite of this serpent. For him, the spirit that dwelled in Billy and peered out of his heavenly eyes as out of windows, that ineffable something that dimpled his tanned cheeks, softened his knuckles, and danced in his blond curls, was what made him, par excellence, the Handsome Sailor. With the exception of one other person [Vere], the coxswain was perhaps the only man on board intellectually capable of fully appreciating the moral phenomenon that presented itself in Billy Budd. And this insight only intensified his passion which, taking on various secret forms within him, sometimes took on that of cynical disdain, disdain for innocence: to be nothing but innocent! However, from an aesthetic point of view, he saw the charm, the courageous casualness, and he would have gladly shared it if he had not despaired of achieving it. Forster and Crozier have crystallized in an exceptional monologue the contradictory affects of the fencing master and Britten has managed to translate his haunting ambivalence with formidable efficiency. Once again, the musical suggestion proves to be infinitely more penetrating than the words.


2. A Devil

"...If Cassio do remain, He has a daily beauty in his life, That makes me ugly ... No, he must die, be't so..."

Shakespeare, Othello, V.i. 18-22.

In a scene invented by Forster and Crozier, Claggart admonishes the sailor: “You are here on a warship. Take that fancy scarf off me! and he snatches it from her without further ado. "And... watch your dress." A little pride, Beauty, and everything will be fine. (Act I, scene 1, fourth scene). This gesture goes far beyond naval etiquette, as everyone can guess. Is it really Billy's coquetry that is out of place on this ship? Isn't it rather her insolent beauty? Wouldn't Claggart give in to the irrepressible urge to touch the object of his budding passion? In fact, the reprimand seems a pretext to stop and contemplate the young man, to establish contact. Billy is not Tadzio, an inaccessible and mute figure, he is very real and sings of his happiness. This incident, anything but trivial, illustrates the brilliant connivance of the librettists and the composer. The "motive of ambivalence", as Jean-François Boukobza so aptly named it, suffices to suggest this dangerous oscillation between opposing impulses, this crack which appeared as soon as Claggart laid eyes on Billy: "A jewel . A beauty”, the dark timbres (trombone and tuba) and the ambiguity between B major and B flat major revealing the duplicity of the captain-at-arms. "Love and hate are not necessarily incompatible", notes Jean-François Boukobza, but their meeting is explosive.

The new paints a more detailed physical and psychological portrait, but the music hints at the complexity of the character and it is up to our imagination to define it. A man of about thirty-five, tall and thin, but of "pleasant figure", he had a "well-shaped face" and "remarkable countenance", "whose features were as clearly defined as those of a medal Grecian", silky black curls surmounting a forehead higher than average, but of a suspicious pallor, the only remarkable details with the excessive width of a hairless chin.(13) While in his film, Peter Ustinov is pleased to emphasize the Mephistophelic beauty of Claggart (14) (Robert Ryan, Billy takes on the features of the seductive and venomous Terence Stamp who made his film debut at the age of twenty-eight), Britten and his librettists left no indication of the profile that the interpreter should have. For my part, I can't wait to discover Samuel Ramey's Claggart, announced next season.

On the other hand, the libretto retains the essential traits of the character: pride and experience nourish a feeling of superiority and exasperation with regard to the crew which seems to extend to all of humanity "Have I ever studied men and their weaknesses? Haven't I learned this hateful world and this ship, this accursed ship? The officers are fools, Squeak, an enforcer unable to think for himself and therefore treated with arrogance and abruptness. The moral as well as physical suffering of the Novice whipped for his clumsiness only inspires him with contempt. “He's only a child and he can't walk,” explains his friend with compassion. "Let him crawl," replies Claggart, who later hits and threatens the child when the latter hesitates to bribe Billy. However, the boy lets out a sentence that makes you think (emphasis added): “Oh, this whip, this suffering! yet you said you would protect me, you spoke to me so fatherly when you found me crying. “Would he have let himself be softened? Unless he was trying to put the novice at ease in order to manipulate him better... Doubt is allowed, if not cultivated with secret delight by the librettists and an accomplice spectator.

Forster and Crozier have not forgotten the sagacity of the master-at-arms. But in the opera, Claggart not only understood Billy's candor, but also the violence he can be capable of. He warns Squeak: “Beware of his character. Watch out for his fists. You're going to play with fire, Squeak, with fire... Let him catch you and he'll kill you. Isn't he aware of the danger to which he exposes himself? This intuition would only reinforce the tragic dimension of the opera and would reduce Claggart, but also Billy, to the role of passive, if not resigned, victims of their fate.

But the main contribution of the opera lies elsewhere, in this extraordinary monologue, where the ambiguity reaches its paroxysm. The true nature of the master-at-arms' attraction to Billy may not be named, but it is clearly described, and its intensity can only instill doubt in viewers most resistant to the homosexual implications of the work (I underline the key phrases):

"O grace! O beauty, goodness! I wish I had never met you! If only I could still live in my own universe, in the depravity where I was born. I enjoyed a kind of peace there, I had established an order there such as that which reigns in Hell. But alas, alas! the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness understands it and suffers from it. O grace, beauty of the soul, o beauty of the body, goodness! how I wish I had never known you! Now that I have seen you, what choice do I have left? None, none! My destiny is to annihilate you, I am doomed to your destruction. I will erase you from the face of the earth, from this tiny floating fragment of earth, from this ship where chance has brought you. First, I will disturb your happiness. I will mutilate and silence the body that shelters you. It will hang at the end of the yard, it will fall into the depths of the sea, and everything will be as if nothing had happened. No, you can't escape! With hatred and envy, I am stronger than with love. O grace, beauty of the body, goodness! there is no doubt, tonight, you are in my power! Nothing can defend you. Nothing ! Nothing! So be it! For what hope is there if love can escape? If love lives on, if it grows and grows strong, where I cannot enter, what hope is left to me in my own universe of darkness? No ! I cannot believe it! No ! That would be too acute a torment! I, John Claggart, Coxswain on The Indomitable, have you in my power, and I will destroy you. »

Rather than letting a passion grow that is obviously impossible to live with and which could transform his existence into a permanent torture, he is determined to destroy its object. From love to hate, a hate commensurate with this love, the shift is known and the distance reduced. Who could still deny that this reading is not definitive, but plausible? In his correspondence with Britten, Forster fiercely defends this admirable monologue, which is reminiscent of Iago's Creed in Verdi's Otello:

“It's the most important piece I've written and I didn't feel, on first listen, that it was important enough musically. (...) I want passion - a constrained, perverted, poisoned love, but which, nevertheless, trickles through the channel of its agony; a sexual discharge gone wrong. Not a heavy depression or groans of remorse. (15) The novelist is probably inspired by one of the most poignant passages of the short story where, through his suffering, the amorous nature of the feelings of the fencing master is timidly touched upon:

"When Claggart's gaze fell furtively on the proud Billy who strolled on the upper deck of the batteries during the leisure time of the second dog watch, exchanging volleys of jokes with other young walkers as he passed, this gaze pursued the merry Sea Hyperion with a meditative and melancholy expression that never left his face, his eyes strangely bathed in feverish incipient tears. Claggart then appeared as the man of sorrows. Yes, and sometimes the melancholy expression was tinged with tender nostalgia, as if Claggart could have loved Billy had it not been for the ban of fate. »

For William Auden, Claggart's attraction is necessarily homosexual:

“(...) the opposition is not strength vs. weakness, but innocence vs. awareness of guilt, in other words, Claggart wishes to annihilate the difference [which separates him from Billy] either by becoming himself innocent , or by finding an accomplice in guilt. Expressed sexually, the magical act must necessarily be homosexual, since it is a desire for identity in innocence or guilt, and this identity demands the same sex. Claggart, the Devil, obviously cannot admit a sexual desire, because that would be admitting his loneliness, which pride does not allow. He must therefore either corrupt the innocence via a subordinate, or, if that is not possible, annihilate it, which he does. »(16)

It is less the genius of the authors that commands admiration, than their audacity and their courage: they dare to preserve the work's irresolute character, they even accentuate it and refuse to simplify its psychological complexity at the risk, very real, to alienate a large section of the public and critics. In the opera, as in the cinema, you need availability, a certain turn of mind to appreciate the open ends, the questions left unanswered or opening onto other, dizzying questions. It is not enough to invoke laziness, the benumbed imagination of the spectator; more fundamentally, ambiguity stimulates some and disturbs others, inclined to prefer the comfort of the first degree, in this case the Manichean parable, nuanced by the tearing of the master of arms, "incapable of canceling in him an evil elementary, though quite adept at concealing it; perceiving the good, but powerless to participate in it” (Melville).

Of course, 1950s England criminalized homosexuality, but it was primarily for aesthetic reasons that Forster and Britten did not explore further the romantic implications of Billy Budd. In July 1979, Peter Pears gave an interview to the American magazine Advocate. The journalist asked him if the opera, written in a more liberal era, would have been more explicit:

“Well, Ben didn't write in the same way in 1951 and in the last years of his life. But I'm pretty sure the libretto wouldn't ask to be more explicit in any way. Melville himself was no more explicit. He is very reluctant, he beats around the bush. The question came to the fore last fall during talks at the Metropolitan Museum. One girl stood up and said, 'I read the other day that Vere is just a fagot [faggot].' This kind of attitude is so petty and vulgar, and totally off the mark. Melville is too huge a figure to talk about like that. And I don't know if we know to what extent Melville himself acted out as a homosexual. It's too easy to read a warm passage in a diary about a handsome sailor and deduce that they went to bed together and all that. »(17)

Forster never dared to publish Maurice during his lifetime and the cult novel circulated for several generations under the mantle before seeing, much later, its first official edition. On the other hand, Britten has never concealed her romantic preferences. Admittedly, he would probably never have written an opera on Harvey Milk (18) or paraded on a float at Gay Pride, but, with all due respect to certain activists, he was not a “shameful” homosexual either. He never hid or displayed himself, and if the couple he formed with Peter Pears was always discreet, it's a matter of modesty, no one has the right to judge them. If Britten wanted to stay in the closet, would he have written Billy Budd or Death in Venice, not to mention Turn of the Screw, which exposes him to the common amalgam between homosexuality and pedophilia? His complicity with Peter Pears was no secret. How many gay artists can claim to have received, on the death of their companion, the condolences of Queen Elisabeth?

On the other hand, if I no longer speak of “homosexual” implications, but of love, it is on purpose. Indeed, this clumsy term not only implies narcissism (homo), but focuses attention on the purely physical dimension of preference to the detriment of its affective component. Donald Mitchell is probably right when he says that Britten does not censor himself, but his irony is the most pernicious, ordinary homophobia, and completely misses the real issue of the work:

"I'm sure a simplistic, homoerotic rendition of Billy Budd - stripped off [stripped off] of his psychological veneer, would knock Budd down to soap opera level, with an all-male cast [all -male cast] - is a travesty, not only of what Britten thought he was composing, but of what he actually composed: which also means that the received ideas about what was or was not acceptable in the field sexual mores did not inhibit him and prevent him from writing the type of opera he wanted to write. In short, Budd's concerns are to be looked for in the courtroom and not in the bedroom [“should be looked for in the courtroom not the bedroom. As Hugo said, "the pun is the dung of the spirit that flies".]

Under cover of gall, Mitchell denies Claggart the right to be in love. Why would the homosexual dimension of Billy Budd reduce the work to a banal story of upset sleeping? It is obviously against this contempt that Peter Pears rebels. A heterosexual hero is in love, a PD just wants to have sex, as if there could only be one sexual act. But beyond the prejudices, Mitchell indulges in a vast misinterpretation. What transpires implicitly in Billy Budd is the tragedy, unprecedented in opera, of the male, whose heterosexist upbringing conditions him to love women, but who is upset in his honor and his virility by the tenderness that inspires in him a handsome sailor. By suggesting that internalized homophobia can generate criminal impulses, Billy Budd would prove to be infinitely more modern and subversive than soap-operas, with their homo on duty, conforming to stereotypes and therefore reassuring, harmless.

The librettists therefore allow Evil to express itself with incredible violence, but a violence that could proceed from love, while the novelist tries to shed light on the mystery of Evil through pathology. Claggart's "spontaneous and profound antipathy" towards Billy, in which envy plays a large part, is rooted in an obsessive and devastating sadism, which seems to exclude all desire (emphasis mine ): “the mania of a perverse nature, not engendered by a vicious education, corrupting books or a licentious life, but congenital and innate”, in short “a depravity arising from nature. » (...) of which the gibbet and the prison provide few examples (...) because no vulgar alloy of the brute enters into its composition, invariably governed as they are by intellectuality. (...) It is not going too far to say it without vices or minor sins. The phenomenal pride that inhabits it excludes them. She is never mercantile or miserly. In short, there is nothing sordid or sensual about the depravity we have in view here. (...) to accomplish an end which, in its unbridled atrocity, seems to be insanity, he will show judgment cold, sagacious, and sane” because “these men are madmen, and of the most dangerous kind, for their madness is not continuous, but occasional, aroused by a particular object. In Britten, repressed homosexuality and sadism would therefore compose a mixture of secret proportions and alchemy which would make Claggart one of the darkest and most disturbing characters in the history of the Opera at the same time as an important figure. from the gallery of sulphurous and disturbing homosexuals that populate Western culture, from Balzac's Vautrin to Hitchcock's criminal lovers (La Corde) via Genet's sailors.


Starry Vere


"You say it's good? that's the best, kindness, and I'm for kindness, Starry Vere, and I'm for you! »

Billy Budd, Act I, Scene 1 (Billy).

And Billy joined in the unintentionally ironic chant of the sailors: “Morning star, who shows us the way out of the night, and shows us the way into the light. A hero in spite of himself, Captain Vere would therefore be the central figure in the drama, which stems from his reactions to Claggart's odious calumny. It is he who takes the initiative to hear Billy, then to confront the two men and to improvise a court in the emergency. Forster and Britten invest him with an almost divine power in the scene of the trial where his officers ask for his advice and where Billy begs him three times, to the point that he appears, in fine, as the only one responsible for the death of the marine. His conduct never ceases to amaze. This captain, who arouses admiration and seems to be unanimous among his men, in fact embodies a vulnerable authority - a theme tackled during the same decade in Gloriana (1952-3) where Elisabeth holds the destiny of beautiful Essex in her hands - and who will even end up abdicating. Fairfax Vere is no longer that man of "positive convictions", whose "intrepidity, bordering on recklessness, never ceases to be judicious" and exceptional "bravery" during a battle in the East Indies have earned the title of captain (Melville).On board the Bellipotent, only Claggart's unctuous manners make the captain impatient and it will be necessary for Billy to kill him for him to finally lose his temper.At Britten, Vere is a different man , fragile, in the grip of anguish. "A giant in combat" (sing the sailors), perhaps, but then a giant with feet of clay.

From the prologue, it is a restless and pessimistic nature that observes that the Good “always presents some vice, the divine image some defect, some imperfection, the song of the angels some fault, the divine word some stuttering. So much so that the Demon always retains his share in all that is human to this earth". The tragic events that took place on the Indomitable are not enough to explain this defeatism. "Oh! done? Oh! what have I done? Confusion, so much confusion!" (emphasis added). "This mist [which] comes surreptitiously to blind us" - a disturbing motif mixed with repeated chords - and saves the enemy ship, reads like a metaphor for the extreme trouble which creeps into the cracks of an anxious soul and will soon paralyze the seat of the will.

In consolidating the opera, first conceived in four acts, Britten renounced - for reasons too long to explain here, but reproduced in note (19) - the brilliant harangue that the captain addressed to the crew , in which his courage and his natural authority were expressed and which concluded the first act with an apotheosis. Here we have the most significant change made when the opera was revised in 1960. It was the only time Vere shows that he has the stature of a captain, that he is a leader of men. Moreover, this triumphal appearance fully justified the admiration of the crew and the blind devotion of Billy, in which lies "the bitter irony of misfortune" as Madame de Staël would say: "I would give my life to save you, ask- me my life. I will follow you, follow you forever. In the new version in two acts, Billy meets the Captain much later, at the time of the confrontation with his accuser. His spontaneous attachment and his unfailing loyalty lose their credibility, they are only based on the laudatory remarks of the sailors and the blissful idealism of the sailor. The lively sympathy of the two men seems all the more equivocal and some, rejecting this euphemism, will see it as a kind of love at first sight. In my opinion, Edmund Tracey is right when he asserts that thus "the relationship between Billy and his captain is not explained: and the question of Vere's moral dilemma is only the more obscure." (20) The mystery that unites them deepens even more. The character of the captain is the subject of a true attempt at rehabilitation which proves (pardon Hugo!) the most fertile innovation of the librettists.

While the news evokes no rumors of mutiny or the slightest concern among the officers before Claggart's accusation, the librettists introduce the subject as soon as Billy bids farewell to the Rights of Man, his first ship ( a few innocuous lines in the short story). It is because they are suspicious that Lieutenants Ratcliffe and Redburn charge Claggart to watch him. Besides, the spectator might believe that he is content to put the new recruit to the test and that these bad tricks do not indicate persecution. At the beginning of the second act, the Captain himself broaches the subject of the mutiny with his officers and the latter express their suspicions about Billy. Although the captain excludes any danger on this side (“Just youthful high Spirit”, it is only the verve of youth), these fears seem to establish the credibility of the ground of accusation invented by Claggart. Moreover, Vere's soliloquy, before the arrival of the officers, already betrays his anxiety (underlined by modulations which fleetingly disturb the serenity of the song - "dolce", "warmly" indicates Britten): "Plutarch... the Greeks and the Romans... our difficulties are identical to theirs. If it could be the same with our virtues and our courage! My God, grant me the light, the light to guide us, guide us all! " (I underline). It is not the proud captain of the Bellipotent who would allow himself to be overwhelmed by doubt and call on God for help! That said, Melville should certainly have reported rumors of rebellion long before Billy's action, so as to explain the captain's certainty - "failing prompt action, the act of the topman, as soon as it was known in the batteries, would tend to rekindle the embers of the Nore which could still be smoldering among the crew" - who convened a summary court-martial and based his verdict on this improbable danger after a skilful, but revolting plea:

“Well, why would he [Claggart] lie, lie so viciously, if as you assure there was no ill will between you? asks the infantry officer to Billy, who doesn't know what to answer and looks at the captain who takes the floor in turn: “Yes, there is a mystery there; but [...] it is a "mystery of iniquity", a question which it would behoove psychological theologians to discuss. [...] It is with the act of the prisoner and with him alone that we are dealing. Billy is fired and the captain leaves his status as a witness: “I would not think of taking another tone now, a tone, for a time, of a coadjutor, if I did not perceive in you – and this at a critical moment – ​​a hesitation and uneasiness which arise, I have no doubt, from the conflict between your military duty and your moral scruples, scruples which compassion brings to life. [...] How can we condemn to a summary and shameful death one of our fellow men who is innocent before God and whom we feel to be so? [...] Would it really be us who would condemn or would it not rather be martial law that would operate through us? We are not responsible for this law and its rigor. [...] Whether Budd acted intentionally or not is irrelevant for our purposes. And while the navigating officer offers to mitigate the sentence, the captain has these decisive words: "for men, the act of the foreman, whatever name we give him when proclaiming it, will be purely and simply a homicide committed in a flagrant act of rebellion. What punishment must follow that, they know. But this punishment does not follow. For what ? They will ruminate. [...] Your lenient sentence would pass in their eyes for pusillanimous. They would think that we are slacking off, that we are afraid of them. »

This is forgetting a little quickly (my emphasis) “the universal popularity that our handsome sailor earned for his virile righteousness” and “his irresistible good nature. " Everyone on the ship loves this "man-child", incapable of the slightest malice: "to handle insinuations and double-meaning words, whatever they were, was quite foreign to his nature", because " for this he lacked sinister inclination and sinister dexterity. In the libretto, Dansker can't help calling Billy a "fool" twice, when he stubbornly refuses to consider Claggart's malevolence. Melville may say that "he is not a white goose", it does not take much cynical to think that such faith in human goodness borders on stupidity. “Billy is still a little bewildered, puzzled. Billy isn't totally smart, although he's totally good" observes Forster (21). As Dansker says, "He's too good. That's his whole problem." who instinctively repels commentators. Tender and naive young girls have always been popular, we like to make fun of them; but what about a boy flanked by the same weaknesses? Insensitive to his charms, the machos will be all the more ulcerated by his credulity. How then could the men of "The Indomitable" conceive for a moment that this ingenuous man rebelled? On the contrary, the only time they saw him lose his temper and utter hateful words ("You dirty little scoundrel"), it was against the weasel (Squeak), this snitch in the pay of the master-at-arms and caught in the act.

They know Claggart, his sly ways, and in their eyes Billy could only have hit him in self-defense or as a result of some terrible injustice. “Claggart (looking Billy straight in the eye)”: to measure the importance of this stage direction, directors should read Melville again. Claggart's "magnetic" gaze, whose violet reflection turns to "muddy purple", first hypnotizes the Handsome Sailor, then paralyzes him and causes this fatal stutter. The crew of "The Indomptable" would understand, if necessary, that their mascot be punished, but would they accept that she be hanged? The threatening and immediately subdued rumor that follows Billy's execution shows how this unjust and cruel act almost triggered the mutiny so feared by the captain. Forster clarifies and accentuates the threat: “Someone thinks of saving you, Billy Boy,” Dansker announces to him. “How they could hate this Jemmy Legs! They swore you wouldn't swing up there.

The chapter on the trial is not only far too long and abstract to be transposed to opera, but it consecrates in Vere an unsympathetic figure who displeases both the librettists and Britten. Forster is indignant: “[...] his respect for authority [Melville's] and for discipline made him deviate. How odious Vere is in the trial scene! [...] His unseemly harangue arises because Melville trembles before an impeccable commander, a superior philosopher and a British aristocrat. (22) Britten notes that times have changed: “So I feel like we've made a new work out of it [Melville's text]. From my own point of view, the way Melville made Vere behave during the trial would not have endeared him to me or encouraged me to write music. (23) Moreover, too many analogies already suggest the twins of the captain and the fencing master: here are two hardened bachelors (Claggart is thirty-five years old and Vere forty), two cerebral, rather withdrawn, but who have knocked about and know men well and whom everything opposes to the simplicity, to the incorrigible naivety of the handsome sailor, "illiterate", "a healthy human creature to whom the dubious apple of knowledge had not yet been offered", in which they are the only ones who can appreciate an extremely rare “moral phenomenon”. In Melville, Vere is so zealous in becoming the instrument of crime, in carrying out Claggart's plans, that he ends up appearing as the most harmful, if not the most striking character in the work. Less allegorical than Billy or Claggart, he is a more ordinary figure and therefore more realistic and plausible which makes it possible to denounce the inflexible, partial and inhuman character of the Justice of men, and more generally of the strict observance of the laws. Much more than the many biblical reminiscences that dot the short story (Billy sharing more than one trait with Christ, also offering some analogy(s) with Adam or Isaac, etc.), it is the message of Christ that haunts the reader during the trial: the Law is made for Man, it is not Man who is made for the Law.

Opera takes a diametrically opposite path. The mists have dissipated, Vere no longer doubts. First, he reacted to Claggart's accusations with more vigor: he immediately demanded proof and displayed his mistrust ("How did this boy get gold, he, a simple sailor? Strange story !”) before even knowing the name of the suspect, then rejects such a nebulous story and warns the master-at-arms about the fate reserved for false witnesses. It was then that he opted for confrontation, sent for Billy and fired the informer. He drew the wrong card. Left alone, Vere does not express “a strong hint of embarrassed doubts” (Melville), but sings with force his conviction and is surprisingly clear-sighted: “John Claggart, beware! It is not so easy to deceive me. This boy you would like to destroy, he is good; you are evil. You counted without me. I studied men and their ways of being. The mists clear... and you will fail, fail! John Claggart, beware, beware! It is not so easy to deceive me. Vanish the doubts which, at that moment, assailed him at Melville's, he will hear Billy, but the better to confuse the demon. His resolve, at this point, obviously makes him much more sympathetic than his intransigence in the news. This is completely new information and only increases the responsibility with which the captain finds himself invested: he knows the truth, but he does not foresee the imminence of the catastrophe. His brief one-on-one interview with Billy - an invention of the librettists - stirs up his anger towards the master-at-arms. Billy thinks he's been called up for a promotion and in the face of his disarming joviality, the captain says to himself, aside: "And this is... the man who is described to me as dangerous... the conspirator, the plotter, the twisted mutineer! This is the trap hidden among the lilies! Claggart! John Claggart, beware! Such assurance makes his attitude during the trial all the more incomprehensible.

The death of Claggart plunges him into total disarray: “What do I see? Scylla and Charybdis, the gates of Hell. I see them too late...too late”, he takes responsibility for the tragedy and laments more about his fate than that of Billy: “My heart is broken, my life is broken. It's not him who's going to be judged, it's me, me. [eight repetitions of the same words] The demon is watching me. When Britten says, "it was the quality of the conflict in Vere's mind that drew me to this subject," one first thinks of the conflicting feelings that animate him from the trial onwards. With all due respect to Forster, who darkens the character by skipping the nuances of Melville, the captain's compassion is very real: "I believe you, my boy", he replies to Billy who proclaims his innocence, "his voice alone betraying an emotion contained”; when he leaves Billy after having announced the sentence to him, he meets the Second (my emphasis): "the sight of this face where, at that moment, the agony of the forts could be read was for this officer, a fifty-year-old yet, a revelation overwhelming. The fact that the condemned man suffered less than the main architect of his condemnation” being confirmed by the blessing addressed to the captain. However, this compassion does not conflict with the cruel demands of military duty. Indeed, the captain does not hesitate, he thinks calmly and quickly makes up his mind: "You see from then on where, under the influence of duty and the law, I am heading with firmness". Therefore, one would expect Britten to alter its psychology and behavior, to stage a real inner conflict, for example, through a monologue. However, the captain's dilemma is barely exposed: “Grace, beauty, goodness brought before justice. How to condemn him? How to save him? How ? How ? that he is already resolved: "Struck by an angel, an angel of God, and yet the angel must be hanged!" The angel must be hanged, must be hanged! he repeats, haggard, bewildered. He, so combative, no longer opposes any resistance. There were no other witnesses and he knows Billy is innocent, so he could save him.

His resolve has evaporated. Contrary to what happens in the short story, he is unable to pull himself together. We measure the change brought about by the librettists by discovering this stunned, apathetic man who shuts himself up in silence when Billy begs him, three times, three heartbreaking appeals that evoke Pierre's denial. "Who could save him, poor boy?" exclaims the Second. The captain, of course, who else? “Help us with all your knowledge, with all your wisdom,” his officers ask him in chorus. " No. Don't ask me. I can't. " For what ? What happened ? Is Vere only a repressed homosexual as some suggest (“just a faggot”)? He would unconsciously let die the object of an unavowable and too painful desire... For my part, I find this interpretation far-fetched and unconvincing. Still, the resignation of the captain must surely not attract the sympathy of many spectators. At first glance, it wickedly resembles weakness, even cowardice. Admittedly, it is not he who recalls martial law, the maneuvering officer takes care of it: “What unprecedented brutality! We lost Claggart, we must avenge him! [...] The rope for his murderer! Neither Heaven nor Hell allow crimes to go unpunished. Vere does not instruct the trial either, which is expeditious, but the harm is hardly less because, if the will and the courage abandon him, his lucidity is intact and his passivity even more revolting (my emphasis): "I accept their verdict. Death is the punishment reserved for those who break earthly laws. And I, who am king of this fragment of land, of this floating monarchy, have demanded death. But I saw divine judgment from heaven, I saw iniquity conquered. I have witnessed the mystery of goodness - and I am afraid. In what court will I appear if I destroy goodness? The angel of God has struck and the angel must be hanged... by my decision. He therefore also takes refuge behind “earthly laws” while fully measuring his responsibility. "We have certainly humanized him, notes Éric Crozier and made him much more aware of the human values ​​involved" (24), but who could identify with him? He felt responsible for Claggart's death, here he is guilty of that of Billy "Grace, beauty, goodness, it's up to me to destroy you."

Is the mystery of kindness the alpha and omega of Billy Budd? Some will perhaps be satisfied with this enigma for “psychological theologians” as Vere would say, who consecrates in Billy a Christ figure, but with the naivety of Adam before the fall. The opera tells us nothing of the face-to-face meeting during which Captain Vere communicates the court's sentence to him. However, Billy's last words to Dansker give us a glimpse of the content of their exchange: “But I had to shoot him, this Jemmy Legs... it's fate. And Captain Vere, he had to shoot me... Fatality. We're really in trouble, he and I, and we really need to be strong, but my problems will soon be over, so I could help him out of his for longer. Will he be his guardian angel? These words find an echo in the opera where, during the brief interview which precedes the catastrophe, in the captain's cabin, Billy repeats his words from the first act: "I will be ready to die for you", and adds: "I I will take care of you, I will take good care of you”. Billy wants to take on the position of coxswain, but it's hard to believe that the scope of his words doesn't go much further... The mystery remains. The old captain who speaks again in the epilogue still does not seem to understand what happened: “Because I could have saved him, I could have saved him. He knew it, his comrades themselves knew it, even if earthly laws imposed silence on them. Oh, what have I done? Oh, what have I done? But he saved me, and blessed me, and the love that passes all understanding came to me" and transmitted to him this hope that inhabited Billy before his execution, which the captain expresses by repeating exactly the same picture (emphasis added):

“I was lost on the endless sea, but I saw a sail in the storm, the sail that shines all over there, and I am satisfied. I saw where she is going. There is a country ["She has her own land" said Billy] where she will forever be anchored. »

The captain could have become the hero of this story, but he missed the chance; in the end, Billy may well be the only real actor in the drama. Something of the order of communion seems to have happened during this final exchange and the librettists had a thousand reasons to preserve its mystery. William Auden saw this ellipse as a weakness, believing that Britten should have remedied it by writing a duet for the captain and Billy (25). I believe, on the contrary, that by confiscating the viewer's imagination, he would have betrayed the very spirit of the work and broken its magic. You still have to want to let your imagination wander...


Britten's tonal symbolism


After the success of Peter Grimes (1945), whose magnificent preludes and sea interludes (Sea Interludes) showed his talents as a symphonist, Britten embarked on the creation of chamber opera, deliberately limiting orchestral resources the Rape of Lucretia (1946) and Albert Herring (1947). Billy Budd reconnects with symphonic writing and summons strong numbers, particularly in the wind sections (note the major role of the alto saxophone whose timbre is associated with suffering). But, beyond a superficial analogy between the initial structure of the opera and the plan in four movements of the symphony, what gives the opera the epithet "symphonic" is its thematic force and the quality of his musical development. The motivic structure of the score is infinitely more tense than that of Peter Grimes or the chamber operas that followed: it suggests a stifling huis-clos, verging on claustrophobia, and which will reach its climax in The Turn of the Screw. (1954). This confined and heavy musical atmosphere reflects both the alienation of the protagonists, trapped by their fate on this ship, and the boring, inevitable routine to which the entire crew is reduced. Britten counterbalances the greyness supposed to represent the monotony of life on board with much more colorful pages: for example the sea shanties of the first act (scene 3), which are reminiscent of the choirs of Peter Grimes and, of course, the continuation of the French ship (act II, scene 1). This spectacular episode, the climax of the score, also reveals the degree of frustration of the sailors whose bitterness makes the climate even heavier, but it also allows us to introduce the fog which masks the enemy and creeps into the captain's conscience. Finally, it is the only opportunity for the latter to appear as a man of action, with unquestionable authority – which was shown more in the first version of the opera where the first act ended with a harangue than the captain addressed to the whole crew.

But what is most striking in Britten's compositional technique is the association of certain tones, used as symbols, with very specific situations, dramatic events or concepts. This tonal symbolism (used in a few earlier pieces) is considerably developed in Billy Budd where it is in a way systematized and structures the work as a whole. It will be one of Britten's preferred means of expression, which will refine it in particular in The Turn of the Screw, A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960), the Church Parables and Death in Venice (1972). The most remarkable example is undoubtedly the key of A major, associated, since at least 1939 (Young Apollo), with beauty and innocence (sometimes ironically as in the chorus of fishermen in the act I by Peter Grimes or in the aria "Tom, Tom, the piper's son" from Turn of the Screw), two ideas dear to the composer and which are even more intimately linked in Billy Budd, but also, from 1942, in the soprano aria "Dear white children" from the Hymn to St Cecilia and which we will find later in the character of Tadzio (Death in Venice).

The symbolic deployment of tonal zones creates a network of allusions (sometimes direct, but most often ambiguous) which makes it possible to translate through a process of musical suggestion what Forster calls, in connection with Moby Dick, Melville's 'prophetic song', which 'wells into action and surface morality like an undercurrent' and 'sits outside of words' (26): those indefinable and often disturbing resonances, vibrations that words, that je ne sais quoi that imperceptibly disturbs the surface of apparently the simplest and most limpid events. Tonality functions on two levels in Billy Budd: on the one hand, as a purely abstract musical structure, it gives the work a unity on a large scale; on the other hand, it acts as a symbolic scheme in which allusions can be, at a more local level, linked to the wider musical-dramatic implications of the keys concerned. This complementarity also justifies the fact that we speak of the “symphonic” character of Billy Budd.

The key that could be considered the “tonic” of the opera, B flat major, appears in the prologue in a semi-tonal conflict with B minor, a conflict that will only be finally resolved in the Epilogue. We can see in this semi-tonal tension the musical translation of Captain Vere's psychological instability, in a changeable mood and often plagued by doubt and indecision. Thus, when he expresses his confusion and bewilderment, his vocal line oscillates between B flat major and B natural. Britten will use these semi-tonal conflicts more and more often in the 1950s. B flat major does not symbolize goodness, which is attributed the tonality of beauty: A major, two qualities from then on inseparable (“O grace, o beauty, oh goodness”, the triad will never be dissociated). B flat major is in fact associated with two more specific concepts: salvation and reconciliation, in identical contexts. Thus, the serene cadence on a B flat major chord that immediately follows the Captain's words in the Prologue: “Who saved me? announces the final resolution of the Epilogue on the words "There is a land where she will forever be anchored." At times, the use of B flat major is deliberately ambiguous, mainly because the motif representing the authority of the captain is also associated with this key. Thus, the captain surreptitiously slips from the B flat minor of his preoccupations to a simple B flat major chord when he commands the officers to give the order to stop the fight (act II, scene 1). The next moment, a simple chromatic distortion of the motif of authority, still in B flat major, is also enough to signify the work of undermining discipline by mutiny: "[...] These louis d'or, furtively, in the middle of the night, he offered them to a Novice. (Claggart). The same tone is found associated with both salvation and authority because Vere finds his salvation in fleeing from his responsibilities as a man by taking refuge behind the authority he is supposed to represent and whose rule he must apply. law.

If the tonic of the opera is B flat major, it is F, in both its minor and major forms, which dominates the action and can be considered the "dominant" key of the opera. F minor is immediately associated with Evil - when Vere sings the words "imperfection in the divine image", his line clearly flirts with this tonality - before becoming Claggart's signature, enshrining the evil nature of the master-at-arms, from the angry arioso where his misanthropy and his darkness are expressed (Act I, scene 1), after the Officers have charged him with monitoring Billy. But the music not only amplifies the text, it also acts autonomously and influences our reading of the drama. During the trial, we are focused on the fate of Billy and confused by the behavior of the captain: they hold all our attention and it is likely that no one will think of John Claggart then. Yet he is omnipresent and haunts the whole scene thanks to the key of F minor which suggests, at least in appearance, his victory. The motive which represents the accusation of murder is very clearly derived from the motive of the master-at-arms as it is heard when he slanders the young sailor; the verdict falls on the low half of Claggart's F minor chord and the captain's resignation (“I accept their verdict”) is expressed in the same key. On the other hand, a remarkable shift takes place when Vere enters the adjacent cabin to communicate to Billy the outcome of the trial. We know nothing of this interview and the ellipse further densifies the mystery that characterizes the end of the opera. However, the key of F minor is gradually supplanted by that of F major: each of the luminous chords which accompany this invisible encounter harmonizes one of the notes of the chord in F major and the ballad of Billy in irons is also anchored, in this tone. The way is therefore clear for the final realization of B flat major, the key of salvation and reconciliation, which also proves to be the sign of Claggart's defeat during the brief deliberation of the officers in the absence of Vere, when they sing, “Poor guy, who could save him? (equivocal words that also resonate like an ironic echo of the captain's anguish). Likened to the character of the captain from the first act, the key of C major seems to have been chosen to translate the simplicity and the reassuring side of the "Starry Vere" in which the crew has blind confidence; on the other hand, during the trial, Britten seems rather associate the triviality of C major with the mediocrity and weakness of the captain, who hides cowardly behind his uniform.

Throughout the opera, the tensions between the keys therefore seem to reflect the evolution of the balance of power between the characters. This tonal confrontation associated with the protagonists reveals an admirably designed architecture: the A major embodying the beauty and innocence of Billy is found halfway between the keys of Claggart and Vere. The harmonization of the notes Fa - La - Do in the interlude that follows the scene of the trial is therefore akin to a form of recapitulation, a reminder of the distribution of the three main roles through their tonal symbolism. It is of course no coincidence that the ambivalence of Claggart's feelings is suggested in an aria in Lamajeur: the master-at-arms is under the influence of the Handsome Sailor who threatens his integrity, his identity. It should be noted that the sixth degree of the Lamajeur scale (fa #), prominent in the monologue, was already audible in the admiring remark of the master-at-arms: "Nice blow, my boy". Britten reaches the paroxysm of irony and equivocation when Claggart accuses Billy - "There is a dangerous man on board" - on music in A major: the beauty and innocence of Billy do indeed represent a threat, but only for the master of 'armed.

Bernard Schreuders


1. H. Halbreich, “This century will be a hundred years old (XIV): And the Opera? (2nd part)” in Crescendo n° 45, February-March 2000, p. 16.
2. This last insight takes up, in essence, the brilliant analysis that Mervin Cook published in Benjamin Britten: Billy Budd. Cambridge University Press, 1993 (chapter 6).
3. Probably in order to avoid redundancy, Josée Bégaud (L'Avant-Scène Opéra, n°158) translates "beauty" as "beauty of the soul" and "handsomeness" as "beauty of the body". But if "beauty" must be understood as moral beauty, it is "goodness" which then seems redundant. Dominique Fernandez dodges the problem by speaking of "beauty" and "elegance" - "handsomeness" designates masculine beauty ("Un opéra sans femmes" in L'Avant-Scène Opéra, n° 158, p. 112). The term "beauty" is also used to designate "a special grace or charm" (Standard Dictionary of the English language combined with Britannica World Language Dictionary. New York, Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1964, sub verbo beauty); in this case, could he not designate, beyond the beauty of the body, this particular grace which emanates from the slightest gestures of Billy, from his smiles and which permeates his words, his singing?
4. During the incident invented by the librettists and during which Billy surprises and corrects Squeak, who was snooping in his belongings, Claggart addresses him with a smile: "Nice blow, my boy. Nice blow well worthy of a pretty boy , Furthermore." (Act I, scene 3).
5. H. Melville, Billy Budd. Paris, Gallimard, coll. "The Imaginary", p.81. In order not to weigh down the text with notes, I will not indicate the pagination of the other extracts.
6.L'Avant-Scène Opéra, n°158, p. 112.
7. "sweet" means "cute" when talking about children, but isn't Billy nicknamed "baby" by the whole crew? Moreover, "pleasant" also has the meaning of "charming", Josée Bégaud avoids these two allusions to Billy's physique by simply translating as "good little guy". Pierre Leyris prefers the rather awkward expression of "charming young guy, nice and full" (see below).
8. He had withdrawn, the range of the role being too high for him. He finally camped Mr Flint during the creation and Claggart in later productions.
9. Britten and Forster's comments are echoed by Philip Brett in the notice that accompanies the recording of the premiere (December 1, 1951), released by VAI Audio (VAIA 1034-3, 3 CDs). You have to hear Billy's ballad by Theodor Uppman: the microphones have managed to preserve the candor, the extraordinary emotion of his singing.
10. Thomas Allen in 1989, in New York (he had sung the role again the previous year at the English National Opera). The excellent English baritone has long and valiantly defended the role of Billy Budd and already co-starred in 1972 with the seductive Russel Smythe at the New Theater in Cardiff. But from 1982 (Covent Garden), his maturity and his banal physique totally ruin the credibility of the character. Theodor Uppman took over the role in 1970, at the age of fifty-one! Unless you believe that his beauty and freshness were inescapable, he certainly couldn't have been more convincing than Thomas Allen in the 80s.
11. BBC radio broadcast, quoted in Benjamin Britten: Billy Budd, op. cit., p.28.
12. Benjamin BrittenBilly Budd. Cambridge University Press, p.26-7.
13. "this complexion (...) seemed to suggest that there was something defective or abnormal in his constitution and in his blood." (Billy Budd, p. 62)
14. Billy Budd (1962), with Peter Ustinov as Vere. Nice work, the film by Claire Denis, also inspired by Billy Budd, takes up some choruses from the opera. This free adaptation transposes the action to the heart of the desert of the foreign legion and further underlines its homo sensual climate. It is a Grégoire Colin with a muscular and tanned body who embodies the double of Billy.
15. Benjamin Britten: Billy Budd, Op.cit., p. 61.
16. W. H. Auden, The Enchafèd Flood, or The Romantic Iconography of the Sea. New York, 1949, p.146.
17. Benjamin Britten: Billy Budd, Op. cit., p. 167
18. First openly gay mayor elected in the USA who inspired the eponymous opera by Stewart Wallace.
19. "I was never happy (and I realize now that Morgan feels the same way) with the current ending of Act I. Vere haranguing the crew, that doesn't ring true," Britten explained to Crozier (Benjamin Britten: Billy Budd, Op.cit., p.75). It is hardly surprising that Britten expresses reluctance in the face of this somewhat too pharaonic and overrated triumph. This sermon had its place in a grand opera in four acts, but not in a shorter opera, in two acts, where it introduces a break in continuity and a premature climax which begins the impact of the naval battle, in my opinion, otherwise successful. Moreover, the recording of the creation, the testimony of Theodor Uppman as well as a letter from Peter Pears, where he confesses his anxiety about the demands of the role, clearly demonstrate that this piece of bravery requires a vocal nature that he didn't have. It takes another stuff to face the choirs and the flashy sounds of this scene.
20. The Observer, May 2, 1965, quoted in Benjamin Britten: Billy Budd, Op. cit., p.142.
21. Benjamin Britten: Billy Budd, Op.cit., p. 29.
22. Same, p.157.
23. Ibidem.
24. Ibidem.
25. Benjamin Britten: Billy Budd, Op.cit., p. 156.
26. E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976, p.126-8

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