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Billy Budd : Temporary Salvation and the Faustian Pact

2006; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 25; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01411890500477042

1547-7304

Stephen Allen,

Theatre and Performance Studies

Abstract In Britten scholarship, the full spiritual implications of Billy Budd have been hedged around, but never directly explicated. While not claiming an exclusive view, this article draws together much of the thinking about the opera from its inception in 1951. It demonstrates how, both in the original production and in the symphonic network of motives and keys/pitches, the opera reveals a psychodrama in the mind of the aging Captain Vere. In so doing, the opera discloses Vere as a self-deluded man who—far from being “saved” by Billy, as he claims—has sold his soul to the Devil in a Faustian pact that merely ensures the salvation of his secular, worldly power (what the librettist E. M. Forster termed “temporary salvation”). The “Christianization” of Billy himself—not found in Melville's novella—is part of this delusion and is dramaturgically essential in causing Vere to rationalize his true motives onto the other operatic characters as he recalls them. In this way the Christian element—encountered throughout Britten's oeuvre but ultimately impotent in its dramatic efficacy— nonetheless is found to be an essential component of Britten's operatic aesthetic. Notes 1Donald Mitchell, Cradles of the New: Writings on Music 1951–1991, selected by Christopher Palmer, ed. Mervyn Cooke (London: Faber, 1995), 379–80. References are to the two-act revised version (1960). 2E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel [1927], ed. Oliver Stallybrass (London: Penguin, 1990), 130. 4Donald Mitchell, “The Screw Keeps on Turning,” notes to The Turn of the Screw (London: Collins Classics 70302, 1994), 9. 3See Stephen Arthur Allen, “Christianity and Homosexuality in the Music of Benjamin Britten,” International Journal of the Humanities 2 (2004), 817–24. 6Britten, “Discussion on Billy Budd,” 197. 5Benjamin Britten, “Discussion on Billy Budd,” Britten On Music, ed. Paul Kildea (Oxford, 2003), 198. Eric Crozier was colibrettist. 7Peter Pears, Britten's lifelong lover and the creator of many Britten tenor roles including Vere, may clarify this “moral problem” further by identifying the tension of Vere's “duty to uphold the law, and his Christian conscience.” Pears was interviewed in the Tony Palmer film about Britten, A Time There Was … (London Weekend Television, 1980, available on VHS, No. 1158, at Kultur International Films, Ltd.). 8See also Robin Holloway, “Strange Victory: The abyss in Britten's soul and the triumph of his will,” Times Literary Supplement, 4676 (13 November 1992), 6; and Philip Rupprecht, Britten's Musical Language (Cambridge, 2001), 97. 9According to Murray Perahia in Remembering Britten, ed. Alan Blyth (London: Hutchinson, 1981), 172. 10Private correspondence, February 2, 2002; see also Basil Coleman and John Piper, “Billy Budd on Stage: An early discussion between producer and designer,” Tempo 21 (1951), 21. Coleman further confirmed that for the first performance of the revised two-act version in 1964, Britten had asked him to make the production “even less naturalistic.” Coleman stated that “Ben conceived of opera as something much deeper than the story or narrative itself.” However, as Piper's designs were more or less fixed at that stage, Coleman confirmed that they were “unable to make the production as abstract as Ben had wished.” When asked whether Britten's intentions might have been to drive the narrative further into the field of Vere's imagination while continuing to present the narrative itself, Coleman replied that such an interpretation was “perfectly plausible.” Coleman further stated that after the first piano play-through of the opera, with Britten at the piano singing all roles except Pears, who sang Vere, Britten was “wrung-out” by the experience and “it was perfectly clear to me that it was more than just physically playing through the work that had wrung him out in this way” (personal interview, Ewing, N.J., December 7, 2002). In his celebrated film version of the opera (sadly not available commercially), Coleman used dissolve techniques to merge the prologue and epilogue with Vere's memory of the past events. 11Available on VHS and DVD through Image Entertainment, 20525 Nordhoff Avenue, Suite 200, Chatsworth, CA 91311. 12Donald Mitchell, “A Billy Budd Notebook,” in Benjamin Britten: Billy Budd, ed. Mervyn Cooke and Philip Reed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 122–34; also Mitchell, “The Screw Keeps on Turning,” 12; and Rupprecht, Britten's Musical Language, 122–23. 13See footnote 8. 14Rupprecht, Britten's Musical Language, 75–137. 15“Not only does everybody disown [Envy], but the better sort are inclined to incredulity when it is in earnest imputed to an intelligent man” (Herman Melville, Billy Budd and Other Stories, ed. Harold Beaver [London: Penguin, 1967], 355, ch. 12). 16Compare with Melville, Billy Budd, 353, ch. 11. 17Abbreviations for locations in the opera score are as follows: “Fig. 143” refers to the rehearsal number; the superscript “4” refers to the fourth measure before the rehearsal number. A superscript numeral after the rehearsal number refers to the number of measures after the rehearsal number. 18Arnold Whittall, “Twisted Relations: Method and Meaning in Britten's Billy Budd,” Cambridge Opera Journal 2 (1990), 169–71. 19The title Indomitable was adopted—by choice or otherwise—over “H.M.S. Bellipotent “(i.e., “potent for war”) found elsewhere in Melville's Billy Budd manuscripts. 20Melville, Billy Budd, 353, Ch. 11. 21Britten, “Discussion on Billy Budd,” 195–6. 22Arnold Whittall, The Music of Britten and Tippett: Studies in Themes and Techniques [1982] (Cambridge, 1990), 127; Melville, Billy Budd, 334–6, Ch. 4, also compares Vere unfavorably with Lord Horatio Nelson. 23The tonal symbolism of both The Rape of Lucretia and Billy Budd has been authoritatively introduced by Peter Evans, The Music of Benjamin Britten, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 124–43, and Mervyn Cooke, “Britten's prophetic song,” in Benjamin Britten: Billy Budd, ed. Cooke and Reed, 89, respectively. 24Compare with a similar Grimes–Borough convergence against Ellen, the E–f tension between Ellen and Peter mirrored in the chronological E–f of Billy's “King of the Birds” aria and Claggart's following music (Act I, sc. 1, Fig. 31 et seq.). See Stephen Arthur Allen, “‘He Descended into Hell’: Peter Grimes, Ellen Orford, and Salvation Denied,” The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten, ed. Mervyn Cooke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 81–94. 25Compare the “evil” Borough's E♭ opposition to Ellen's A (/D) opening in Peter Grimes, Act II, scene 1. 26Coleman and Piper, “Billy Budd on Stage,” 25. The Novice is mentioned only briefly by Melville, Billy Budd, 346, Ch. 9. Britten's operatic use of the strangely sensual alto saxophone sonority in the Novice's music is as striking as its plangent presence in the Sinfonia da Requiem (1940). 27Hans Keller, “Benjamin Britten and the Rôle of Suffering,” Frontier (Winter 1973), 236–9. In response to such observations by Keller elsewhere, Britten also responded, “It is difficult, if not impossible, to comment objectively on what is written about oneself. But I admire Keller's intelligence and courage enormously, and certainly about others he is very perceptive!” (“Discussions of Billy Budd,” 227). Britten's Third String Quartet (1975—three years after the Keller article cited above) was dedicated to Keller. I was a student of Keller's at Dartington in the early 1980s. 28“It is Lucretia with which Budd may be the most fruitfully compared both spiritually and stylistically” (Mitchell, Cradles of the New, 381). 29This Agony Motive has been connected with “repression, rebellion and mutiny” and more besides (Benjamin Britten: Billy Budd, ed. Cooke and Reed, 1; and Rupprecht, Britten's Musical Language, 82–9). The point I make here is that this Agony Motive, however ambiguous and however specific, is located within Vere's memory itself—and, thus, within Vere. The appearance of the Agony Motive, when not directly connected to Vere, therefore, is a symbolic remapping of Vere's consciousness onto Claggart, the Crew, and Billy, et al. 30Compare with “The Queen's Epilogue” at the end of Gloriana, where the queen is transported “outside time and space” in a kind of judgment scene before God, her conscience, and the audience. 31Claire Campbell, “Second Thoughts on Billy Budd,” Adam International Revue, 20 (1952), 20. 32W. H. Auden, The Enchaféd Flood (New York: Random House, 1950), 122. Because of his seminally decisive personal and artistic influence on Britten in the 1930s and early 1940s, Auden's view of Billy Budd—shaped in part by Forster's—may have influenced Britten's, regardless of whether Britten ever saw it in print. 33The following analysis acknowledges that triads also are employed elsewhere by Britten “naturally” and not necessarily symbolically. Identified here is Britten's gestural use of triadic sequences in a manner suggestive of symbolic use in an operatic context. 34Britten's reharmonization of a single note in a “religious” context may be traced back to “Jesu, as Thou art our Saviour” from A Boy Was Born (1933), which is entirely constructed around the pitch B. 35Whittall, “Twisted Relations,” gives the fullest account of the profound equivocation of F major—and of any central “tonality”—after the interview chords. Furthermore, it is striking in these respects that the series of “Death/Fate” figures in Death in Venice—infusing Aschenbach at a metaphysical level with the “plague”—is introduced by the Traveller in f minor, an extension of Aschenbach's interior f minor that opens the opera. 36C. N. Manlove, “An Organic Hesitancy: Theme and Style in Billy Budd,” in New Perspectives on Melville, ed. Faith Pullin (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1978), 276–7. 37This anticipates Quint's flat inflections in the Governess’ music at the end of The Turn of the Screw (Fig. 1448). 38Compare Aschenbach's statement “Let the gods do what they will with me” at the end of his Dionysian dream in a vocal line inscribing f minor–major in Death in Venice, Act II, scene 13, Fig. 28713. 39Evans, The music of Benjamin Britten, 464; and Mervyn Cooke, Benjamin Britten: War Requiem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 62, 77. 40Stephen Arthur Allen, Benjamin Britten and Christianity (D.Phil./Ph.D. dissertation, Oxford University, 2002). 41Evans, The Music of Benjamin Britten, 365. 42Peter Pears, in Remembering Britten, ed. Blyth, 22–3. 43See also the A–E♭ of Claggart's Act 1, scene 3 aria. 44Humphrey Carpenter, Benjamin Britten: A Biography (London: Faber, 1992), 498. 45The Soutar cycle was composed during spring and summer of 1969, while Owen Wingrave was composed between April and August of 1970. 46Mitchell, “A Billy Budd Notebook,” 170, fn. 24. 47Mitchell, Cradles of the New, 381–4. 48Mitchell, Cradles of the New, 380. 49See Forster's letter to Britten, December 20, 1948: “Billy is our Saviour, yet he is Billy, not Christ or Orion,” E. M. Forster: Selected Letters, ed. Mary Lago and P. N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1985), letter 387. 50Melville, Billy Budd, 397–8. 51Possibly Vere's F-A and subsequent “flat” triads are reversed by the Chaplain's A-F and subsequent “natural” and “sharp” sequence; see Figure 1. Figure 1. Interview chord sequence. Display full size 52Nothing in opera can be in “real time,” and I use this term relatively speaking—that is, in contrast to the passing of “clock time,” in operatic terms, e.g. during the drumhead court scene. 53George Harewood, The Tongs and the Bones: The Memoirs of Lord Harewood (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981), 86. “The fact that my rejection [of Christianity] is not vehement does not save it from being tenacious…. I no longer wish to save or be saved.” E. M. Forster, The Prince's Tale and Other Uncollected Writings, ed. P. N. Furbank (London: Andre Deutsch Ltd., 1998), 317–18. It may be ironic that in spite of Forster's stated passive-aggressive stance towards Christianity, he may have initially failed to comprehend Britten's deployment of his own position through the Vere and Claggart convergence. Forster was later to refer to Billy Budd as “my Nunc Dimittis” (cited by Peter Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life [London: Harcourt, 1978], 146). 54One notes Britten's triple (Trinitarian?) text repetitions: “strong,” “all,” “enough.” 55For a list of examples proving the widely accepted thesis that A major is Britten's “Apollonian” key, see Benjamin Britten: Billy Budd, ed. Cooke and Reed, 165, fn. 5. Melville makes the direct connection of Billy with Apollo in chapter one. 56Mitchell, Cradles of the New, 381–4. 57Patricia Howard, The Operas of Benjamin Britten (London: Barrie and Rockliff: The Cresset Press, 1969), 38. 58This reference to Plutarch, also author of Erotikos, is not in Melville. Vere's obscure reference to Claggart as a “veritable Argus” (Act I, scene 2)—also not in Melville—stems also from his Classical bent. 59The late Theodor Uppman, the creator of Billy, recounted how Britten said to him “Ted, I want you to be your natural, good, self. You are Billy Budd, so let your inner radiance emerge and don't think too much about the other characters.” Uppman added, “if I knew then what I know now about those other characters, I would have been very concerned indeed” (personal interview, New York, December 6, 2002). 60See also Evans, The Music of Benjamin Britten, 219: “the Governess who has saved [Miles’] soul at the expense of his life.” 61Manlove, “An Organic Hesitancy,” 276–77, 280. Manlove's assertion that Vere manipulates principles as “a mask for self-preservation” is further supported by an investigation of McArthur (1813), which appends article XXII of the Articles of War (1749)—the article cited by the First Lieutenant at the execution of Billy in the opera (Act II, scene 4, Fig. 130, an inclusion that might be used to counter a claim that the background role of the Articles of War in Billy's trial is a red herring)—by drawing a clear distinction between murder and manslaughter, the latter definition clearly applying to Billy. Britten retains the specific date of 1797 from Melville in Vere's prologue and epilogue. This is a full five years after the publication of McArthur's treatise, with which any Captain on a British man-o-war would have been expected to be familiar. In addition someone in Vere's position would have known that a fleet commander, not a ship's captain, was the only person of rank permitted by law to preside over a court martial that invoked the death penalty. See also Benjamin Britten: Billy Budd, ed. Cooke and Reed, 158, fn. 9. Co-librettist Eric Crozier assiduously researched such naval protocols; see Eric Crozier, “The British Navy in 1797,” Tempo 21 (1951), 9–11. 62In this sense the observation that Vere's B♭ is inclusively symbolic of both his “salvation” and “authority”— because Vere “sees his salvation partly in terms of the justification given to his actions by his own clearly-defined authority”—may be viewed as the mechanism by which Vere justifies his sin as “guilty-innocence”—a projection of his “phenomenal pride” (see Benjamin Britten: Billy Budd, ed. Cooke and Reed, 91). 63A major is the relative major in the dominant of b minor. See Benjamin Britten: Billy Budd, ed. Cooke and Reed, 90, where Cooke is unequivocal about Billy = A, Vere = B♭. 64Whittall, “Twisted Relations,” especially 162 ff. 65Philip Reed, “On the Sketches for Billy Budd,” in On Mahler and Britten: Essays in Honour of Donald Mitchell on his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Philip Reed (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1995), 249; and Donald Mitchell, “Violent Climates,” in Mervyn Cooke, The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 207. 66“I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy (London: Penguin, 1938, repr. 1958/65),78. 67See footnote 6. 68It may be said that Forster's original criticism that the music of Claggart's aria did not describe the “sexual discharge gone evil” indicates his misapprehension of Britten's distribution of this through the Vere and Claggart convergence, anticipating that of the Governess and Quint (Mitchell, “The Screw Keeps on Turning”). The “evil” here, as in The Turning of the Screw, is communicated primarily by the music. See Stephen Arthur Allen, “ ‘Sexual Discharge Gone Evil?’: Britten's Billy Budd and Displacement of ‘The Mystery of Iniquity,’ ” Proceedings of the 4th Annual Hawaii International Conference on Arts and the Humanities (forthcoming, http://www.hichumaniaties.org/proceedings_hum.htm).