Billy Budd, July 2008 Santa Fe Opera
Billy Budd is set on an English battleship in the Napoleonic Wars.
Billy Budd was pressed into service, but seems to thrive on it. He
is cheerful, patriotic, hardworking, and, generally good. This
annoys the hell out of John Claggart, the ship's Master at Arms
(read police chief). He is a nasty bit of work who prefers that
everybody else be primarily motivated by fear of him and his minions.
He finds this much more satisfactory than all this junk about
patriotism, friendship, and loyalty. Billy Budd's increasing popularity
among the crew throws a spanner in his works, and he conspires to
do him in.
(The singer portraying Claggart did a really excellent job. Somewhat
overblown, of course, as is all opera, but still a believably nasty
guy. Ever notice how the villains make much better drama than somebody
who is all sweetness and light? Richard II is much more dramatic
than Henry V, and Iago trumps them both.)
So Claggart frames Billy on the charge of fomenting a mutiny. Captain
Vere is not much inclined to believe him, and has the two of them
to his cabin to have it out. Claggart makes his charges, and Captain
Vere asks Billy to answer them. In moments of stress Billy is
susceptible to stuttering, and is unable to get a word out. In his
frustration at being unable to defend himself, Billy strikes Claggart
on the forehead with his fist, killing him.
Both striking a superior and murder are capital crimes, under the
articles of war, and Captain Vere feels he must convene a Court Martial.
The court martial is bound by the facts of the case, and cannot consider
extenuating circumstances. Billy pleads to the captain to intervene
and save him, but the captain, though he recognizes the right of the
case, feels duty bound to let it proceed. Billy is sentenced to hang.
It is only at this point that Billy's essential goodness becomes apparent
to the listener. He understands that he has broken the rules in a time of
war, and begs his friends not to try to rescue him or to demonstrate
in his favor. When the time comes, his last words are "God bless
Captain Vere." Here, as in the book of Job, the way of God with the
world transcends human understanding, and both Billy and Captain Vere
(in an epilogue) look forward to a future life, in which it will all make
sense.
The opera, by Benjamin Britten, is, of course, based on the book
by Herman Melville. It is, I think, an improvement (I read the book
several decades ago, so I could be a little wrong there.) Billy's
goodness in the first act is not as well transmitted by dialogue as
by the description in the book, but the drama from the court martial
on is really intensified by the music, and the opera, unlike the book
makes Captain Vere into somebody who is completely conscious of what
he is doing.
Melville's book is based, very, very loosely on an actual incident.
This incident is really quite different, but also very, very sad.
It occurred on the brig Somers in the American navy, not an English
battleship. The Billy Budd character was an ensign, not an able seaman,
and was seventeen years old, or thereabouts. He was drawn in by a couple
of hard bitten and reprehensible old sea dogs, who where plotting a mutiny.
They were interested in the young ensign because of his ability to
read maps, which they lacked. The three were overheard plotting, and
the captain, quite rightly, had them cast in irons stapled to the after
rail. The rest of the crew rather thought he had gone overboard in
the treatment of the ensign, who was, after all, just a kid. When
the captain overheard the crew muttering, he lost it. In a panic that
a full-scale mutiny might be imminent, He convened a court martial, and
beat on them until they found the three guilty of mutiny, and hung them
from the yard arm, with the officers standing with drawn swords to cut
down any crew member who objected, sympathized, or even failed to lend
a hand on the whiplines that raised them. A sad and unnecessary set of
deaths; there is little question that they ship could have safely returned
to Baltimore and handed the conspirators to the proper tribunal. "Billy
Budd's" life would have been scarred by his criminality. but not over.
(Actually, I'm strongly in favor of the juvenile justice code of today,
wherein a single misstep is forgotten if the threshold to adulthood is
otherwise successfully crossed.)
My sympathies go out to Captain Bligh, who was the object of a major
mutiny, but one in which no lives were lost. A good mariner, but perhaps
a rather strict disciplinarian.
So that is the way a major novelist works, converting a sad, tawdry
and very human affair into a confrontation between good and evil, taking
place in the miniature world of a warship. Each art form has its own
conventions. Opera is not a novel, and a novel is not historiography.
Each can be accepted on its own terms. The fact that I prefer documentaries
and opera to most novels and movies is a personal quirk, not a claim
that one form of conventions is better than another.