Brilliant ‘Billy Budd’ at Glyndebourne

In 1846 off the coast of Mexico a young seaman aboard a two-masted US sailing ship struck an officer and was court martialed. The captain felt he had to condemn him to death, but asked forgiveness from the young seaman. His response was: “Yes sir, and I honour you for it. God bless the flag.” Four years earlier, aboard a US frigate, one midshipman and two petty officers were convicted of planning a mutiny, and hanged from the yardarm.

One of the officers sitting in judgement was a cousin of the American novelist Herman Melville, who incorporated both these incidents into his novella, Billy Budd. He transferred the setting to a warship in the Royal Navy in 1797, just after a minor mutiny at Spithead earlier that year, and the more serious mutiny on the Nore near Sheerness on the south bank of the Thames estuary.

Benjamin Britten’s eponymous opera, with a libretto by E.M. Forster and Eric Crozier, originally came in a four-act version, later combined into two in 1964. Forster (and others) felt that Melville was disgracing Captain Vere, and he wrote to a friend: “It has been exciting work — the rescuing of Vere from his creator being no small problem. Claggart (the Master at Arms) came easy — natural depravity, not evil being the guide — and I have written him a monologue which, though akin to Iago’s in Verdi’s Otello, works out on different lines. And Billy himself caused much less trouble than expected …”

All these three main characters, Vere, Billy, and Claggart, embody in their own way aspects of the main character in Britten’s best-known opera Peter Grimes. Vere has the poetry, Billy the physicality and sheer hard work, and Claggart the dark destructive force. Between the three of them they carry this tragedy to its fateful conclusion.

At the start we see Captain Vere as a lonely figure, recalling his own confusion over the events we are about to witness. Allan Clayton made an excellent Vere, his voice compelling the crew’s admiration and their moniker “Starry Vere”. Thomas Mole made a youthful and clear-voiced Billy, and Sam Carl sang Claggart’s lines such as his admiration of Billy — “A find in a thousand, your honour. A beauty. A jewel. The pearl of great price” — with a fine bass intonation, but lacked gravitas.

The production, showing the interior of the battleship HMS Indomitable as if we the audience were part of it, gives a sense of the intensity and close quarters under which the men work. This is an opera, like Janácek’s House of the Dead, with no female voices, but the male voices here were simply excellent: William Thomas, Dingle Yandell, and Daniel Okulitch as the Sailing Master, Mr Redburn the First Lieutenant, and Lieutenant Radcliffe made a fine trio of senior officers, Clive Bayley was superb as the wise old seaman Dansker, and Laurence Kilsby sang beautifully as the Novice.

The cast is huge, with numerous other solo roles and Midshipmen from the Trinity Boys Choir, and Powder Monkeys from Glyndebourne Youth Opera, all under the fine baton of Nicholas Carter. I saw this Michael Grandage production, with its subtle lighting by Paule Constable, over ten years ago and am delighted Glyndebourne have revived it. It still works — brilliantly.

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