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| Photo: Richard Hubert Smith |
In January 1949, Benjamin Britten, librettist Eric Crozier, and novelist EM Forster met at Britten’s home in Aldeburgh, on the Suffolk coast, to discuss ideas for a new opera, based on Herman Melville’s novella Billy Budd. “Ben made a rough drawing of what he thought a three-masted schooner was like, going by what Melville had written,” Crozier recalled in a recent documentary. “That was the exact genesis of the opera.” The battleship, HMS Indomitable, with its various decks, cramped quarters, and maze of public and private spaces, contains the whole world of Billy Budd. It is a world of men; the absence of the fairer sex is striking. (Treble voices are supplied by kids playing the “powder-monkeys,” boys who carried gunpowder on warships.)
The Indomitable is a “seventy-four” (a ship with 74 guns), engaged in Britain’s wars against revolutionary France. The year is 1797. As the action begins, the men near enemy waters; tension is high, not only due to of the imminence of battle but also because of recent mutinies on Royal Navy ships (inspired, in part, by radical ideas from France). The naval officers keep a close watch, ready to sniff out the slightest hint of rebellion among the men. “Life’s not all play on a man-of-war,” an officer gruffly reminds them, whip at the ready, as they scrub the deck with holystones. The sailors moan their discontent in the haunting, chant-like chorus, “O heave, O heave away, O heave.” The sense of compulsion and cruelty is as heavy as their lament.
