the darkness understands and suffers
by
Douglas Messerli
E.
M. Forster and Eric Crozier (libretto, after Herman Melville’s book), Benjamin
Britten (music) Billy Budd / 1951,
the production I saw was at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in a production by
the LAOpera, March 16, 2014, 2:00 p.m.
My
companion Howard insists that the first time we heard Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd was either through a
Metropolitan Opera radio broadcast or through the loan of a recording from our
beloved neighbor, Bob Orr (see My Year
2007), but I have no memory of this incident. The first time I recall
hearing music from the Britten production was, strangely enough, in the public
square of Ghent in Flanders, in front of the great cathedral there, were a
group of performers were gathered singing the sometimes meaningless
chantey-like songs from the opera (see My
Year 2011). When I asked my
friend, Tom van de Vorde, what was going on, he told me that they were
advertising a production of Billy Budd at
the local opera house. Had I been dressed properly and had planned for more
than a day to trip to that city, I would have quickly scooped up tickets and
attended the event. For years, I’d wanted to see this significant opera.
Now that I have seen a production, the
other afternoon, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion where the LA Opera performs,
I can claim that it truly is a great
work, and this production certainly did it justice, and director James Conlon’s
LAOpera orchestra, in this production, truly reached the heights. Our
amazement, accordingly, that the house for this last performance was only
partially full. As I told Howard as we exited, “Why isn’t this a sell-out
performance? Everyone might enjoy this opera!”
True, Melville’s often metaphoric
statement of Goodness and Evil may seem to some as a 19th century
conceit. And certain of its symbolic images, Billy’s Christ-like crucifixion
and John Claggart’s devilish (in this version, quite similar to Othello’s Iago) machinations may seem to
some as clumsily heavy-handed.
Britten’s lush and beautiful score,
moreover, is far more complex than many even more radical operas; except for
Billy’s forlorn confrontation of death after he has been convicted of
Claggart’s murder, Captain Vere’s arias of tortured memory, and Claggart’s
declaration of the destruction of Billy, there are few moments in this work
when we are presented with conventional arias or even long passages of musical
characterization. And even in some of the passages I noted, Britten’s
orchestration seems to move in a direction other than the line of soloists. Billy Budd is a grand chorale work,
dependent upon its powerful choruses of sailor chanteys and work-based
sufferings—an opera of collaboration instead of individuation.
Another problem for many opera-goers,
although not as obvious in this particular production, is that Britten’s work,
despite the composer’s attempts to defuse some of his librettist’s, E. M.
Forster’s intentions, is still a work of seething male sexuality, in particular
a world of closeted—and sometimes not so closeted—male lust for other males.
The very situation of being aboard H. M. Indomitable for its screw is to be
squeezed into dark quarters with other sexually pent-up men, all them lonely,
oppressed (and in the case of their impressment into service) repressed, even
tortured, literally dripping with testosterone and sweat while waiting for
action—an attack against the French, a push against each other, or simple
bodily release.
Into this hot-house environment, the
beautiful and handsome (a quality by which even Claggart and Vere describe him)
Billy Budd (played by the appealing Baritone Liam Bonner) is thrown, recognized
almost immediately not only for his good looks but his utter innocence and his
goodness. You can almost hear the denizens of the ship slurping their mouths in
desire. And within a few moments of the opera, everyone aboard seems to have
fallen in love with Billy, describing him in ways that lovers might describe
their beloved: Baby Budd, Beauty, and other such appellations. As much as
Britten was determined to establish his Billy as a symbol of goodness and
faith, Melville’s Billy remains, as in Ustinov’s film, essentially a corporeal manifestation of what
these men are truly seeking: an absolutely tempting and galvanizing male
specimen. If Billy represents the
foolish innocent of Christ, in this work, no matter how one might temper it—a
fact that Ustinov’s film absolutely flaunted through the stunning looks of its
male lead (Terence Stamp)—Billy is a sexual object, which the Master-of-Arms
(his title itself working as a kind of unintentional pun), Claggart (Greer
Grimsley) cannot but perceive. Although, Britten and Forster ultimately
attempted to downplay this aspect of the work (and Los Angeles LA Opera
director Conlon carefully tiptoed around these issues in his before
pre-production talk) most opera-viewers today—in a society radically different
today than Britten’s homophobic 1951 British world, wherein homosexuality was
still punishable by imprisonment—recognize that Billy Budd is a work never far from a blatant expression of
homosexuality, an issue which, even within today’s more tolerant views may lead
some opera-goers to feel uncomfortable with it or, at the very least,
dissociated from it.
Although Claggart may be the utter
apotheosis of evil, a devil who—as opposed to Genesis which claims that God “divided the light from
the darkness,” suggesting that the darkness cannot know the light, reiterated
in the New Testament John I, 1: “And the light shineth in the darkness; and the
darkness comprehended it not” —sings that “the darkness understands and
suffers” the light. If this is surely as close as we can get to Satan, a figure
who refuses to be “separated” from what he can have no part of, it is also the
desperate cry of a man who, sexually closeted, who cannot possibly have what he
might desire. In Billy’s innocence, his goodness, and his beauty, Billy lies
outside of Claggart’s reach, while all the others upon the boat take pleasure
in his company; and this very fact drives the sadomasochistic officer to
attempt to destroy the young new foretopman.
Billy, in his role as the high
climber of the ropes, is able, almost like an angel (another of his
appellations) to fly higher and see farther than his peers, giving him a
glorious vision of reality that none of the fellow-sailors—mostly forced to
hover on ship board or below—can perceive. In Britten’s vision, unlike
Melville’s or even Ustinov’s film, Billy has a kind of Christian view, a vision
of a “ship in anchor forever,” an end of the voyage in life that might suggest
a peaceful view of heaven. But in Billy’s innocence, Melville never posits a
religious viewpoint for Billy nor the idea of a Christian afterlife. Billy is
of his time, a man who is joyful just to be alive—again the very antithesis of
Claggart—who in his simplicity never aspires to a heavenly vision; his view of
the afterlife (as in his before-death admission) is the oozy slime of the sea
and the life within it. If he becomes a kind of Christ, it is in the vision of
the others, not his own.
Although mutiny, the mutiny of previous
ships such as the Nore and others, is very much behind the kind of hysterical
behavior of The Indomitable’s officers, it is, despite their abasement and
abuse, not in the sailors’ vocabularies, particularly not in Billy’s
comprehension, who only wants to bravely serve the captain, Starry Vere. But it
is, ultimately, that hysteria, that fear of the officers—of the British upper
class in general—that creates, at least in Britten’s telling of the tale, the
very predicaments of which they are most entangled. Neither Melville nor the
Ustinov film suggest that any of the sailors conceived of a possible mutiny,
but in Britten’s version, after the hanging of Billy, the whole cast heave
forward in explicable growls toward the officers as if threatening them in a
way the ruling class always foresaw. It is a powerful moment which not only
represents possibly mutiny, but the pent-up sexual energy and hate of every man
on board, as if Billy’s death has released some vast, howling banshee force of
love and hate that had been kept at bay by the man himself. And it is
particularly indicative of Vere’s own reiteration that “every man on board
knew” we could have made another judgment, to have found Billy innocent of the
murder he was fated to enact. Vere knows also that he might have not only
served as witness, but could have interceded against the conventional and
unfair articles of war which he upheld.
Despite Vere’s own ability to absolve
himself from his actions, I think it is difficult, given the British officers’
preoccupations with class, social distinctions, enslavement, xenophobia, and
homophobia to easily exonerate Vere and his officers of their behavior. Of
course, we must leave the theater, each of us, with our own conclusions. And
that is the rub.
In the end I had to admit, at a dinner at
our beloved Taylor’s steak house with Howard after, that although Billy Budd is an opera which anyone
might enjoy, many might find its complexities of musical, symbolic, and
thematic overlayings as difficult to penetrate. The audience with whom I shared
this masterwork, and who had remained after intermission, grandly applauded
this exiting production as Howard and I did, sharing the delight of Britten’s
provocative masterwork.
Los Angeles,
March 17, 2014
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