On Music

...But, he continues, Britten's "garden produces some of the most beautiful roses to be marveled at in East Anglia...

...I don't think it would be too fanciful to see the essence of Britten's music as being at midpoint between the awesome waves and the gladsome roses, encompassing them both...

...Next, there is the homosexual composer's preoccupation with overtly or covertly homoerotic subjects...

...The conductor Raymond Leppard was to reminisce about that "nearly catastrophic" crush, andhow, after the Venice premiere, Pears had to drag away the distraught Ben by train to avoid "a major scandal...

...The third reason for Britten's choice was a strong streak of pessimism that extended patently to the possibility of finding happiness in love, although the composer and Peter Pears lived together in ostensible harmony for 40years...

...My summary here follows the opera, which in various ways departs from Melville's plot and characterization...

...Various plots fail to achieve his end, so Claggart mendaciously denounces Billy as an inciter of mutiny to the Captain...

...Still, Britten was keenly attracted to young boys, for one of whom, early on, he even thought of giving up his musical career...

...It is based on two incidents that took place in the American Navy of his time, but that he transposed to the British Navy which, following a coupleof mutinies triggeredby the French Revolution, had cause to be nervous...

...An off-the-air tape of the 1951 premiere made by Mrs...

...The ship is clearly the world...

...He claims to have found peace, yet, as Arnold Whittall points out, "to a vocal line whose descending pitches cast a shadow over the serenity of the harmonic resolution...

...That version sank without a trace...

...Not all of his modes appeal to me equally...

...But the coauthors worried about other things, notably the absence of female voices in the mix...

...As Forster wrote, "What an opera with all-male parts will be like, passes me...

...His letting Billy die has shadowed his entire life, but thanks to Billy he also espied a shining sail of hope on the horizon, promising an ultimate and eternal safe harbor...

...Victor Gollancz, in his Journey Towards Music, speaks of Verdi's humanity even in the music of evil characters, "to be found in no other composer, though Britten gets close to it in some of Claggart's music in Billy Budd...

...But we are to sympathize yet more with the disaster these feelings precipitate, no different from those caused by many operatic—and nonoperatic—heterosexual passions...

...The process is fateful, unstemmable...

...Since Pears' voice was not especially big, and he himself was not compellingly masculine, it did not sit well with the singer...

...They recognize that Billy is—because of his very virtues, along with his highly symbolic flaw of a stammer— unfit for his world, and as much the cause of Claggart's and Vere's downfall as those two are of his...

...After a struggle with himself, he announces the guilty verdict to Billy offstage...

...It was out of teasing affection for him and his longtime companion and collaborator, the exquisite tenor Peter Pears, that I wrote my only limerick: "There was a young man from Great Britain/ Who was scratched as he buggered a kitten./ For it looked, it appears/ Not unlike Peter Pears,/So it even fooled the great Britten...

...They stare threateningly at the officers, who subdue them with a masterful command to disperse...

...A naval court-martial in 1797 required a panel of senior officers, could not be carried out in drumhead fashion, and, in the case of a death penalty, had to have the Admiralty's approval...

...The text's slightly archaizing prose— sometimes following Melville verbatim —is on the whole effective...

...This is interrupted by the sighting of a French vessel and excited preparations to accost it...

...The sea figures importantly as well in Billy Budd, the work that ushers in the 3 8-year-old composer's middle period...

...It was commissioned by the British Arts Council for the 1951 Festival of Britain...

...John Amis, who knew Britten well, tells us in his memoir Amiscellany that "although Ben was prudish and anti-Bohemian, so much of his work seems to be pleading for his homosexuality to be considered normal...

...He used four flutes, an alto saxophone, plus much percussion in the orchestration, and composed a good deal of the music in the upper register...

...A PolyGram video of the revised version is well spoken of, with Thomas Allen as an apt Billy, but I don't favor opera on video...

...You cannot go wrong with any of the last three sets, particularly if you feel, like Sir Georg Solti, that Billy Budd is Britten's best opera...

...The libretto, despite certain unconvincing, occasionally ludicrous, touches, fascinates...

...On Music Britten's Billy Budd By John Simon Benjamin Britten (191376) has been one of my favorite composers ever since I was overwhelmed by a production of his Peter Grimes, probably the greatest of English operas and one of the few absolute masterpieces of 20th-century musical theater...

...his timing is 15 minutes longer than Britten's on Decca...

...This segues seamlessly into the "Billy in the Darbies" ballad taken from Melville, as the chained Billy, on his last night, sings about his anxiety...

...Britten, very touchy about criticism and devoted to his friend, cut the scene from the revised version...

...But the sound is expectably mediocre, with bits missing where the tape had to be changed (VAIA 1030...

...This year, Chandos brought out a lustily recorded studio performance of the revised version on three discs (CHAN 9826), with the London Symphony Orchestra playing at full tilt...

...When upset, he breaks into a stammer...

...Billy Budd, by the no less homosexual Melville, fits right into the schema, what with the handsome young sailor arousing repressed erotic sentiments both in the evil master-atarms, Claggart, and in the good but torn and tormented Captain Vere...

...Here, though, Britten's genius came to the rescue...

...Dansker, a wise old sailor and Billy's friend, sneaks in with some grog and toast for the condemned youth, and the news that the men might mutiny to save him...

...Dramatic confrontations are musicalized with masterly rhythmic and harmonic inventiveness...

...Anthony Rolfe Johnson, a bit past his prime, is nevertheless an imposing Vere...

...close enough to the water's edge that the sound of huge breaking waves and screaming herring-gulls overhead could be heard...

...John Tomlinson's Claggart is ideal, except for "one or two moments of unsteadiness...

...Claggart, Evil...

...And the recordings...

...The crew is frustrated when, largely owing to a mist and insufficient wind, the Indomitable loses the French ship...

...The opera Billy Budd, my subject here, exists in two versions: the four-act one of 1951, and the 1960 revision in two acts—prepared for a BBC broadcast—that became the definitive one...

...the state versus the individual...

...As he fantasizes about his body being buried in the deep sea, the orchestra, too, is in its lower register, but the voice is written high, for what the French call baryton martin...

...under pressure," as Alan Blyth has noted...

...Vere, as the only witness to the killing, could save Billy...

...the only precedent, Le Jongleur de Notre Dame [by Massenet], is not encouraging...

...To begin with, as Nick Rossi and Robert Choate observe in Music of Our Time, he "was born in a house facing the North Sea...

...Typical is the moving scene of Billy, chained between two cannons on his final night...

...Almost always, he wrote parts for boys into his compositions, and he was especially taken with young David Hemmings, the Miles of his opera The Turn of the Screw, who later became a movie star...

...There are also rhymed interludes: the aforementioned ballad, and various shanties, including some hilariously semi-obscene ones supplied by Kenneth Harrison, and set by Britten to a lilting, enthralling melody...

...Yet certain verbal and experiential parallels among these three go deeper than that...

...But his judgment was perhaps colored by its being the only one he got to conduct...

...Unfortunately, John Claggart, the master-at-arms, a diabolic figure universally hated, also falls in twisted love with Billy...

...Kent Nagano's pacing of his well-disciplined Halle Orchestra can be quibbled with, but the sound is good and so is the economy of getting it all on two discs...

...That home, where Britten spent most of his later life, was in Aldeburgh, not far from Lowestoft and, deliberately, difficult to reach from London...

...It should be mentioned that historically Melville's story does not hold water...

...Pears' Vere shows traces of aging as well...

...The all-male soundscape went over successfully...

...the public versus the private good...

...The biggest differences involve Captain Vere of the Indomitable, the scene of the action...

...Significantly, work on Budd caused Britten, along withmuchjoy, serious depressions, so that at one point he nearly gave up...

...The music is marvelous whenever it is choric, which is often, frequently with the crew's shanties overlaid by the principals' arioso dialogue...

...Britten's fondness for sea and sail—bred of his childhood in Lowestoft—inspired his first opera, Peter Grimes, and led him to choose a home some quarter-century later that was also on the water's edge...

...Given its strong supporting cast, accomplished playing by the London Symphony Orchestra and respectable sound, this is a significant three-disc set...

...In the Epilogue's last word there is a highly suggestive closing moment for the unaccompanied, naked human voice...

...That dedramatizes the inner conflict between the man's heroic and intellectual sides...

...Older opinions had Billy equaling Good...

...Already as a small child, he was composing on the piano 20-second tone poems prompted by such things as a wreck at sea...

...and Vere, Intelligence and Justice, caught in the middle...

...Eric Halvarson, as Claggart, is a trifle more interested in pear-shaped tones than in vocal acting...

...How good is the opera in its final form...

...As Donald Mitchell has argued, for all the sexual overtones, "the preoccupations of Budd should be looked for in the courtroom, not the bedroom...

...Something is lost, though, if we first encounter Vere in his cabin, reading Plutarch—a bookish man, far from the electrifying Starry Vere...

...Two critics, Emest Newman and Winton Dean, compared it to something out of H.M.S...

...Unlike in Melville, the entire story is framed by a Prologue and Epilogue in which Vere, now an old man, looks back at all this...

...Goodness and beauty are his feared enemies, however, and he resolves to destroy the angelic youth...

...someone should stage the opera for him...

...Claggart resumes his accusation...

...Interestingly, the Italian composer Giorgio Federico Ghedini produced a one-act Billy Budd simultaneously, with a text by the Nobel laureate Salvatore Quasimodo that introduced a female voice—Billy's sweetheart—in a dream...

...The men are, I think, to be viewed as three aspects of the archetypal human being, in whom idealistic impetuousness, destructive impulses, and yearning for objectivity warringly and tragically coexist...

...Simon Keenlyside's Billy sounds terrific...

...But Britten created all his protagonists for his lover, and Pears was a tenor...

...Claggart is appropriately a bass...

...It remains for the orchestra to convey the unseen Abraham-andIsaac situation with a chordal sequence of 34 triads, some sounding anguished, some mournful, some resigned...

...It was dramatically important, but, as Alan Blyth noted, "musically not particularly distinguished...

...Pinafore...

...The baritone Geraint Evans, whom Britten wanted for Billy, but whose voice did not reach high enough (he gallantly turned down Britten's offer to transpose the ballad a tone lower for him, and was rewarded with the role of the Sailing Master), comments in his memoirs: "It's impossible to imagine a female voice having any part in [the opera...

...We are to sympathize with good Captain Vere's attraction to handsome young Billy, with Billy's rapturous adulation of "Starry" Vere, as his devoted men call him, and even with wicked Claggart's perverted obsession with the youth...

...In the premiere of Britten's four-act work at Covent Garden, the long intermissions for slow scene shifts proved cumbersome...

...The fourth aspect that drew Britten and his librettists to the story was the legal, indeed moral, dilemma: The letter of the law versus the many extenuating circumstances in Billy's accidental killing of Claggart...

...The famed violist William Primrose, a heterosexual, told of his amusement when, staying at their house, he noted their slippers serenely side by side under their bed...

...It is the kind of unforgettable touch he excelled at...

...He now has Claggart confront the youth with his lies...

...Kind, valiant, enthusiastic, he is loving and beloved by all...

...MELVILLE STRUGGLED over a long period with the novella Billy Budd, Foretopman (or Billy Budd, Sailor), his last, unfinished work, not published till 30 years after his death...

...Newer, cannier readings reveal Vere as jejunely suppressing his loving self, and discover a touching element in Claggart, wounded by Billy's "beauty, handsomeness, goodness...

...Britten had the score of Verdi's Falstaff by his side as he composed—a good model, but he lacked the gift of, as it were, endless melody...

...Purely orchestral passages tend to be ravishing, with fetching use of solo instruments...

...The grand-voiced Thomas Hampton is a mite too mature and refined for Billy...

...Billy squelches any such idea, declaring himself now fortified for the morrow...

...In the presence of the entire crew, he is hanged from the yardarm, his last words being "Starry Vere, God bless you,' a cry the men take up...

...As Forster wrote in an oft-quoted letter to Lionel Trilling, work on the libretto "has been exciting...

...Melville's Vere was cruder than the opera's...

...Vere, who feels strongly about Billy, disbelieves the charge, still more so upon interviewing Budd...

...Billy Budd, a young, handsome sailor is taken from the merchantman Rightsof-Man and pressed into service on the warship Indomitable...

...Peter Glossop is a decent Billy, and Michael Langton is a fierce Claggart...

...Such was the voice of the American Theodor Uppman, who matchlessly created the role in 1951, and was also a splendid Pelléas...

...In a topnotch supporting cast, Alan Opie (First Lieutenant), Clive Bayley (Dansker), and Mark Padmore (Novice) are especially impressive...

...The Act One scene (not in Melville) wherein Vere calls a muster to address the crew about forthcoming combat, allowed the Captain to display his rousing man-of-action side, and Billy and the crew to adulate him...

...Furthermore, Britten introduced a melancholy obbligato for solo piccolo, representing the moonlight filtering in through a porthole...

...But the composer's fourth major opera was on his mind since 1948, when he discussed it with the librettists ?. ?. Forster and Eric Crozier...

...Alas, Claggart's self-revealing soliloquy falls far short of the comparable Credo of Iago in Verdi's Otello...

...But Billy has one defect, perfection not being within human grasp...

...Unable to defend himself verbally, he strikes Claggart on the head and accidentally kills him...

...First, a 1968 studio recording reissued on CD (Decca 417428), with Britten again conducting, though with not quite the old tautness...

...Significantly, Billy had a similar vision...

...The 1998 recording (Erato21631), as the only available full four-act version, is of obvious interest...

...Too old for Billy, he became Vere, with whom, in any case, Britten could best identify himself, and whose part duly emerged the biggest...

...And again in his outstanding final creation, the opera Death in Venice, based on the novella by Thomas Mann...

...he could easily sway his subordinate officers, the judges...

...But he merely states the facts, and responds neither to the officers' plea for advice nor to Billy's cries for help...

...A court-martial ensues...

...the rescuing of Vere from his creator benigno small problem...

...Uppman captures her husband's unsurpassed Billy, Pears in his prime as Vere, and the intense conducting of the stillyoung Britten...

...That leaves three important choices...

...Unfortunately, the good Richard Hickox' tempos drag a little...

...There are several good reasons for Britten's attraction to Herman Melville's novella...

...the musical balance is perfect...

...Even in the new version, some of us find fault with Billy's being a baritone, and the older father figure, Vere, a tenor...

...Until 1967, homosexuality in England was a crime punishable by prison...

...Remarkable about Britten are his equal excellence in all areas of composition (including even cabaret), and the constant evolution of his style and technique over his entire life span...

...In a short essay on Britten, the eminent German music critic H. H. Stuckenschmidt reminds us that the flat, pebbly East Anglian coast is "gradually being swallowed by the sea...

...Philip Langridge, a stage-experienced Vere, is thoroughly persuasive, and shows no sign of his recent tiredness...

...The mood is one of bitterness, and the officers fear mutiny...

...Still, when they see him swing, they burst into an inchoate sound described by Melville as "the freshet wave of a torrent roaring distantly through the woods...

...I feel slightly more comfortable with his early and middle periods...