Billy Budd
Beyond the communication of the sentence, what took place at this interview was never known.
Herman Melville 1
Psychology has split and shattered the idea of a 'Person', and has shown that there is something incalculable in each of us, which may at any moment rise to the surface and destroy our normal balance.
E. M. Forster 2
In his first three operas, Britten had exploited the dramatic ambiguities latent in the source narratives, but for his next opera he went further, selecting a text, Herman Melville's novella Billy Budd, Sailor, which intentionally cultivated an aura of mystery and inconclusiveness and which had at its core an essential indeterminacy of form and theme which the original author had deliberately emphasised: 'The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction cannot so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact ... hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial . . . Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges' (p. 405). 3 The undefined homoerotic sub-currents latent in Melville's text disrupt his equivocal narrative with 'gaps' or 'mysteries' which might positively invite musical interpretation or embellishment. It is perhaps surprising, therefore, that Britten's operatic reading of Melville displays evidence of an attempt to 'de-eroticise' the text and to impose a dramatic and psychological unity on Melville's 'ragged' form, principally by reducing the original text's narrative multiplicity and by establishing a conceptual frame in the form of a retrospective Prologue and Epilogue. However, perhaps less unexpectedly, the musical score frequently injects the very innuendo and uncertainty which the libretto seeks to eradicate.
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