Sunday, June 05, 2016
The orphan is liked but immediately victimized by the perverts
BENJAMIN
BRITTEN – PETER PEARS – BILLY BUDD - 1951
The re-mastering of the original BBC production
of this opera by Benjamin Britten is a real treat with Peter Pears. The story,
adapted from Melville by E.M. Forster and Eric Crozier is a fascinating tale
about the evilness of human justice on a ship under the Acts of War and other
regulations having to do with court-martialing anyone for any misdemeanor in
war time on a man-of-war and the opera deals with a lot of crimes all punished
by death, an accusation of planning a mutiny, the actual striking of a superior
officer, the murdering (though it was manslaughter) of this officer, and
treason of the King and the country in the face of the enemy. Falsely accused
by his superior officer, the foundling (who never managed to say “orphan” when
asked about his family because of his stuttering, though he managed to say
“foundling”) and volunteer in the royal service against the French in 1797,
Billy Budd is unable to defend himself with words because he is silenced by a
fit of stuttering again. So he hits the accuser and kills him, accidentally or
incidentally but not with the intention of killing him. But that accuser is his
superior officer, hence Billy Budd deserves death for hitting his superior
officer and committing murder. He has to be hanged twice but they will reduce
it to once. The point is not that miscarriage of justice, but the all-male
environment that creates tension and stress that is at times hardly manageable.
The said superior officer is “down on” Billy
Budd, in other words attracted by him sexually or at least emotionally, which
he cannot accept probably both because that questions his masculinity and his
authority over the men under him, and hence he decides to have him pay for that
unmanly attraction of his. But Billy Budd is liked by everyone and the captain
is himself attracted to that young and handsome foundling. This time we cannot
say the attraction is sexual but the attraction is a deep emotion that makes
the captain like Billy Budd and vice versa makes Billy Budd like the captain.
In an all-male environment all kinds of distortions can occur in the
relationships among the men in this closed environment that the ship is. But
that’s not what Benjamin Britten tries to show. He tries to show the dilemma in
which the captain was when the events took place. He had to stick to what he had
seen and avoid what he may have sensed or felt at the time. He then stuck to
his testimony that meant two death penalties. But in his old age staged at the
beginning in one flashback in the opera and at the end, that captain
acknowledges the idea that he could have saved Billy Budd because he had the
power to pardon the convicted man, and even before he could have testified
about the loyalty of Billy Budd, hence the accidental and provoked assault on
Billy Budd’s superior officer by this superior officer’s absurd accusation.
But he didn’t and thus he, the captain, is to
be tried in and by another court, a divine court in which he believes, and he
believes this one is not going to be as lenient as Billy Budd. But the
following episode is the main moment of that story. Just before being hanged
and released to the deep sea, Billy Budd actually forgives the captain and that
saves the captain’s soul, but then the captain could have pardoned on the spot
and he did not do it, and that does not save his soul, that dooms his mental
peace and his future after death. That’s the story of a sea episode in which a
captain endorses a miscarriage of justice just to keep his liking for the
accused secret in an all-male environment. It is very similar to Peter Grimes,
except that in Peter Grimes the young apprentices die due to accidents, and yet
a retired captain tells Peter Grimes to go at sea and sink himself in his boat
and he does it. Miscarriage of justice again. But it is an opera, so what is so
musical in this story.
The music and the singing are systematically
dramatic and somber like hell. Instruments often run one against the others,
creating conflicting points, even at times hiatuses, and that gives to the
words and the images since it is a visual show a tremendous depth. But there
are some moments when this depth becomes a tremendous elevation. Before his
execution Billy Budd is visited by an older sailor who brings him a final drink
and a biscuit. That scene is full of emotion and Billy Budd concludes his making
his peace with the whole world and the injustice he is going to suffer with a
final sentence that reads as follows when sung: “That’s all, all, all, and that’s
enough, that’s enough, that’s enough. This is a marvelous direct allusion to
Solomon’s trial or wisdom (due to the two repetitive triplets in the sentence)
but it shows that the captain was the one who was confronted to a decision that
could be compared to Solomon’s decision: Billy Budd is guilty twice and he is
going to die, but this time the captain did not react like the real mother did
in Solomon’s story, accepting to lose her child for it to live, thus revealing
she was the real mother, the captain did not accept to make public his liking
for Billy Budd in order to enable him to live for purely egotistic
considerations to avoid any innuendo about his masculinity of authority, let
alone his sense of justice.
And that’s what is wrong with human justice:
it is blind, deaf and mute: it does not see, does not hear and does not tell
the truth. That’s why the text and the music are full of such triplets when
dealing with life and the relations between the men on the ship. There are
dozens of examples. Dankster declares that he “is too old for fun, for dancing,
for women.” The three judges declare “We’ve no choice, we’ve no choice, we’ve
no choice” and this trinity is crucified by a final repetition “no choice.” And
at the end Billy sings “turning, turning, turning heads away from the hoist and
the belay,” with a double trinity, Solomon’s number anew and the allusion to
his wisdom and his wise decisions. And the vicious and lying John Claggart, the
master-at-arms, specifies his intention about Billy Budd as follows: “Nothing
can defend you, nothing can defend you, nothing, nothing, nothing.” The first two
phrases evoke some kind of war logic (he is at war against Billy Budd) and the
final trinity builds up a pentacle of five “nothing” and that is devilish: he
is so evil that the good of life is perverted into pure satanic evil with his
warlike intention against his own men: if that is not treacherous, what is?
The music that accompanies the gathering of
all the men and the arrival of Billy Budd for his execution is a real gem and
diamond in the whole opera with rolling drums from time to time, with whining
horns and mocking flutes that create a fake environment to introduce a fake
sham of justice that is a real execution nevertheless. And the forgiving
declaration of Billy Budd after the reading of the sentence “Starry Vere, God
Bless you” shines like a dawning sun in that visual scene of an execution that
was taking place in the middle of the night, under the light of the stars and
that you never see except through the eyes and movements of those who look at
it, of the beholders who are moved in some kind of maybe an intention of
protest, and that is killed in the bud by the troops sent by the captain. This
last scene of graphic voyeuristic indirect non-vision is a great way to be
poignant without being over-realistic.
There is though a last remark I would like to
add. This opera has a pattern I have already alluded to when comparing it with
Peter Grimes. We have the sea again, we have some brutal life at sea and it is
increased by the war going on. Once again it is the orphan, the foundling, the
abandoned boy who is victimized by his superior, both his direct superior, the
master-at-arms, and the captain of the ship himself who puts the three
commanding officers who compose the court martial in a snaring situation to
condemn Billy Budd on an incomplete testimony, which is in itself a crime in
those Books of War, Billy Budd is thus the stranger in the crowd on the ship,
the one who has no home and no family, as well as the victim of the situation,
though this stranger among many is liked by all except one perverse individual.
And it is this one individual who manages by his own death to trap everyone
else in his lie. Remember Peter Grimes who was not liked by anyone but because
an old spinster of a gossip ran a campaign of rumors against him, though she
won in the end and yet saved her skin.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 6:49 AM 
