Britten conducts ‘Billy Budd’ – premiere of revised version, 1960

Billy Budd: The evolution of a masterpiece

Introduction by Arnold Whittall

The opera in 1951
After the unprecedented success of three major operas in three years – Peter Grimes
at Sadler’s Wells (1945), The Rape of Lucretia and Albert Herring at Glyndebourne
(1946 and 1947) – it is no surprise that the Arts council of Great Britain should
have offered Benjamin Britten the prestigious commission for an opera to mark the
Festival of Britain in 1951. Britten accepted the commission during the autumn of
1948 and, characteristically, his choice of subject was far from the kind of cosy
establishment-enhancing theme his commissioners might have preferred. Courage
and resilience in time of war can certainly be found in Billy Budd: but they are
outweighed by far more sinister and ambiguous issues within the microcosm of
male society embodied by a ship’s company during the Napoleonic Wars. As both
pacifist and homosexual, Britten was acutely sensitive to the degrading
circumstances of idealistic young men vulnerable not only to futile death in battle
but also to the predatory malevolence of officers who were meant to protect as
well as discipline them.

The source for this subject is the novella by Hermann Melville left unfinished at his
death in 1891. In asking both E.M. Forster and Erik Crozier to work on the
libretto, Britten brought together a major novelist and critic with no experience of
the theatre and a seasoned professional who had supervised the first production of
Peter Grimes and provided the libretto for Albert Herring – the opera which Britten
had dedicated to Forster, acknowledging a debt that extended back to his discovery (in 1941, in America) of Forster’s essay on the Suffolk poet George Crabbe. This
had provided the initial inspiration for Grimes.

The evolution of Billy Budd – extensively chronicled in Britten’s published
correspondence – involved plenty of argument, and Forster was not shy of raising
the kind of basic questions about the musical treatment that Britten would have
resented deeply from anyone for whom he had less innate respect than the revered
author of Howards End and A Passage to India. The basic work on the libretto was
done between August and December 1949. Britten began to compose the music in
February 1950, eventually finishing the composition draft in August 1951, and
completing the orchestration just in time for the first performance on 1 December
1951.

That performance took place at the end of a rehearsal period which was unusually
fraught even by the standards of busy and rivalry-ridden opera companies. The
original plan had been for Billy Budd to be premiered at Sadler’s Wells, where
Grimes had had its triumphant first staging, but financial problems ruled this out,
and Covent Garden took up the challenge instead. Production and design were in
the hands of friends in whom Britten had full confidence – Basil Coleman and John
Piper. But the designated conductor, Josef Krips, was forced to withdraw on health
grounds, and Britten himself had to take over less than a month before the first
performance. Critical reactions were more mixed than had been the case for
Britten’s earlier operas, and although there were plenty of positive comments, Billy
Budd was not immediately taken up around the operatic world to the extent that Peter Grimes had been.

In 1952 it was staged both in Germany (Wiesbaden) and the United States (the
University of Indiana). There was even a version shown on American television in
October 1952 with the original (American) Budd, Theodor Uppman, in the cast.
But Britten himself was soon absorbed by other operatic projects – first Gloriana
(1953), then The Turn of the Screw (1954). By 1959 he had even more on his
compositional plate than usual: plans for a new kind of music drama reflecting his
interests in Japanese theatre and Gamelan music (the ‘parables for church
performance’), an opera for the renovated Jubilee Hall (A Midsummer Night’s
Dream), and a large-scale work commissioned to mark the consecration of the new
Coventry Cathedral in 1962 (War Requiem). Even so, when the BBC proposed
reviving Billy Budd by way of a studio recording, Britten decided that it was both
possible and desirable to act on some of the reservations he had developed about
the structure of the opera’s original version.

The opera in 1960

The 1952 Wiesbaden production had shown the way by grouping the original four
acts into two parts, with short breaks for scene changes between Acts 1 and 2, and
3 and 4, but only one actual interval. Yet in 1959 Britten went further. While only
minor adjustments were needed to transform the third and fourth acts of the
original score into Act 2, Scenes 1 and 2, the extreme contrast between the final
scene of the original Act 1 and the first of the original Act 2 required more drastic
surgery.

In 1951 Britten had been particularly upset by criticism of Act 1 Scene 2, which likened Captain Vere’s somewhat bellicose address to the assembled ship’s company
to a scene in Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore, and also suggested that Peter
Pears’ voice was not heroic enough to carry it off. Britten now proposed to
eliminate this scene completely, and introduce Vere as the thoughtfully solitary
figure seen in his cabin in the original Act 2 Scene 1 (to become Act 1 Scene 2).
This meant that Vere could not be shown encountering Billy Budd until the point in
Act 2 Scene 2 when Billy is accused by Claggart of mutiny. Some commentators
have regretted this change, but most believe that Vere’s apprehensions about the
prospect of mutinous behaviour are more important than any earlier sighting of
Budd himself. These apprehensions are shown in Vere’s discussions with the other
officers in Act 1 Scene 2, when Budd is mentioned as by far the best of HMS
Indomitable’s newly press-ganged recruits.

This change did not alter the fact that – despite its title – it is Vere, and not Billy,
who is the opera’s central figure. As Britten put it in a comment during the
discussion broadcast before the 1960 revival, ‘Billy always attracted me as a radiant
young figure … but I must admit that it was Vere who has what seems to me the
main moral problem of the whole work, round which the drama was going to
centre. … I think it was the quality of conflict in Vere’s mind … which attracted me
to this particular subject’. That Vere becomes a Wotan to Claggart’s Alberich –
failing to act for the greater good because of crippling self-doubt and
irresponsibility (masked as decisiveness) – provides the core of the opera’s complex
portrait of flawed authority. As ‘King of this fragment of earth, this floating
monarchy’, Vere (after the model of Peter Grimes) is too much the introspective
outsider to manage the social tensions or to control the corrupt manoeuvres of
those on whom he relies for his power – in particular, the ship’s blackly menacing

Benjamin Britten (1913 – 1976)

Billy Budd

Prologue
Track 1: I am an old man

Act 1

Scene 1
Track 2: Pull, me bantams!
Track 3: Boat ahoy
Track 4: First man forward
Track 5: Your name?
Track 6: Billy Budd, king of the birds
Track 7: I heard, your Honour!
Track 8: Come along, kid!
Track 9: Christ! The poor chap…
Track 10: What’s that? What’s those whistles?
Track 11: Starry Vere we call him
Track 12: Narrator

Scene 2
Track 13: Boy!
Track 14: Gentlemen, The King!
Track 15: Ay, at Spithead…
Track 16: We are, Sir, Claggart is an able one
Track 17: Narrator

Scene 3
Track 18: Blow her away
Track 19: Samoa
Track 20: Hi! You…A…A…!
Track 21: Over the water
Track 22: Come here
Track 23: Billy!…Hist! Billy Budd!
Track 24: Dansker, old friend…

Act 2

Scene 1
Track 25: Introduction
Track 26: I don’t like the look of the mist
Track 27: With great regret I must disturb your Honour
Track 28: Deck ahoy!
Track 29: Volunteers! Call for boarding party volunteers!
Track 30: There you are again, Master-at Arms
Track 31: Oh, this cursed mist!
Track 32: Narrator

Scene 2
Track 33: Claggart, John Claggart, beware!
Track 34: Master-at-Arms and foretopman
Track 35: God o’mercy
Track 36: Gentleman, William Budd here
Track 37: William Budd, you are accused…
Track 38: Poor fellow, who could save him?
Track 39: I accept their verdict
Track 40: Narrator

Scene 3
Track 41: Look!
Track 42: Here! Baby!
Track 43: And farewell to ye!
Track 44: Narrator – Interlude

Scene 4
Track 45: ‘According to the Articles of War’…
Track 46: Down all hands
Track 47: Epilogue: We committed his body to the deep
Track 48: Closing announcement

This recording was made from a broadcast on
13 November 1960.

The recording is from The Harewood Collection at Music Preserved

Remastering engineers: Roger Beardsley, Paul Baily