I recently saw Benjamin Britten’s tragic opera Billy Budd. A friend bought me a ticket to go to Glyndebourne, which was a crude shock. I would have to dress up, bringing back sinister memories of moving from state to private school aged 10, where the uniform was part of the authoritarian message.
In the sweetness of the gardens outside the giant Jacobean house, I forgave the upper middle class for looking the way they do – dinner jackets or occasional flowery alternative jackets costing far more – and an air of eccentricity and slight bafflement.
The modern concert hall is a masterpiece of simple and functional design, and it dovetailed with the stage warship’s interior of 1797, so that the audience was caged in the class categories of the era:
Top Deck: Captain and his officers in their fine uniforms:
Main Deck: Seamen and non-commissioned officers, slave-driving the crew
Below Deck: Claustrophobic sleeping quarters of the ordinary seamen.
The opera is framed by the mental agony of the captain, who knows that he allowed an essentially innocent person to be hung from the yard arm.
Billy Budd
The singing and orchestral playing in Britten’s dark opera was magnificent. But I am looking for the moral of the spectacle.
The story begins with the latest three recruits who have been press-ganged and forced into military service. They are interrogated in turn by Claggart, a non-commissioned officer with the title Master of Arms. He is a sinister and terrifying figure, the ship’s enforcer.
As they sail towards battle with Revolutionary France, Claggart turns against the handsome and brave young sailor Billy Budd, in part because he was seized from another ship called The Rights of Man. It’s a phrase to horrify the British ruling class. There’s also a hint that Claggart is a repressed homosexual who feels erotic desire for the sailor that he can’t express. Since his whole role is to intimidate and coerce the crew, how could he admit to tender feelings?
The upshot is that Claggart frames Billy Budd as a dangerous mutineer. In a private hearing before the Captain, Claggart reels off a string of false accusations and fake evidence. Billy is not allowed to speak until the end and is then thwarted by his stammer. Unable to argue his case, he takes a swing at his accuser – landing such a powerful blow that Claggart falls lifeless to the deck.
Billy Budd
The Captain is appalled because he has a clear intuition that the sailor was innocent and that Claggart was driven by malevolence. But he sees no alternative to launching a summary court martial. Crucially he refuses to give evidence himself.
Three senior officers conclude that Billy Budd has killed a superior. Under the King’s Rules in time of war, the only sentence is death.
Billy is hung from the yard arm to the dismay and anger of his shipmates, who have been assembled at the dead of night. The captain is left to feel the weight of his own responsibility. In time of war, the rules left no option.
Britten is perhaps asking us to consider – when are human beings not at war? He is also reflecting the moral dilemmas of the Second World War, when many on the left had no idea what they were meant to be fighting for, after the betrayal of Spain and Czechoslovakia.
Life throws up continual moral conflicts. And the imperialist or macho response is likely to involve intimidation and cruelty. Are we not all forced to be Claggart sometimes, if only to stop a child running into the road?
The opera contains a devastating critique of the class system as it operated under the British Empire – with a ruling class entitled to coerce the rest of the population into war and suffering. The social class system still exists, as Glyndebourne makes apparent. But the audience at Billy Budd had made the choice to confront the moral quandaries of our post-imperial age.