Sea-changes: Melville-Forster-Britten: The Story of Billy Budd and its Operatic Adaptation. By Hanna Rochlitz.

Abstract

During the autumn of 1948, after discussions with E. M. Forster, Benjamin Britten decided that Billy Budd would be his next opera, with Forster and Eric Crozier as librettists. Between those initial discussions and the first performance at Covent Garden a little more than three years later, on 1 December 1951, Britten, now in his late thirties, fulfilled many other commitments: the completion of the Spring Symphony, the composition of Let’s Make an Opera (The Little Sweep), an edition of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and various smaller works, including Lachrymae and the Six Metamorphoses after Ovid. There were also many performances with Peter Pears and the English Opera Group, often involving extensive travel, not to mention nurturing the fledgling Aldeburgh Festival, which had been launched in June 1948. Britten’s energy and productivity were never more remarkable than at this stage of his career. Yet it should be no surprise if the famed ambiguities and equivocations of his compositions sometimes turn out to have as much to do with loose ends and acceptable compromises—determined by tight performance deadlines and the pressing need to move on to other things—as with the modernist aspiration to embody ambivalence as multivalently as possible in any finished work. That this is likely to be true of Billy Budd is reinforced by the composer’s decision to produce a revised two-act version of the opera during the autumn of 1960, nine years after the first performance of the original four-act version, and the differences between the two, as well as the reasons why each version took the form it did, have been exhaustively discussed by many writers down the years. Now the documentary evidence of the work’s fraught and speedy genesis is given an even more comprehensive dusting down by Hanna Rochlitz. Rochlitz justifies her claim that she is the first scholar ‘to give extensive consideration to all the currently available material’ (p. 27). It is regrettable, given the high level of quotation from so many diverse sources, that the book’s Index is so sketchy. Yet, even when she might not always seem to allow for the full range of ideas considered by some of those sources, Rochlitz still offers several useful corrections to earlier commentators.