Britten's Seventh

"Last night a masterpiece was born, and it will outlive the lot of us," declared London's Sunday Graphic. Not all the critics were that ecstatic, but London seemed to agree last week that Benjamin Britten's seventh opera, Billy Budd, was far & away his best.

For his first grand-scale opera since Peter Grimes, 38-year-old "Benjy" turned again to tragedy and the sea. He took his story from Herman Melville's novel of the British navy during the Napoleonic wars, and enlisted one of Britain's leading literary lights, Novelist E. M. Forster, to work on the libretto along with Eric Crozier, an old hand in Britten operas.

There were plenty of technical problems, including the theoretically fatal one of an all-male cast. Billy Budd, the innocent young sailor who represents good in the allegorical struggle with evil, stands in sharp contrast with the wicked Master-at-Arms, Claggart. But Captain Vere had to be "tidied up," made into a more central symbol of conflict: he knows that Billy was framed, but he also knows that under the Articles of War Billy must hang for striking Claggart.

First-nighters sat through the first act in a ho-hum mood, but the second brought them to life with Billy's fight with one of Claggart's henchmen and Claggart's bitter monologue rejoicing in his own depravity --sung by Basso Frederick Dalberg. Britten's triumph was the third act, in which Captain Vere (Tenor Peter Pears) walks to Billy's door, accompanied by long-measured chords, to deliver the death verdict. When the curtain fell for the act, there were seconds of silence, and then shouts of "Bravo, Benjy." Billy's fourth-act soliloquy, poetically sung by U.S. Baritone Theodor Uppman, and Captain Vere's epilogue, capped the climax.

At the fifth curtain call, Britten himself edged shyly out of the wings. After him came Forster, beaming benignly, and Crozier. It took 18 curtain calls to satisfy the crowd.

Wrote the Sunday Observer's careful Eric Blom: "The same salty sea tang of Peter Grimes is there with . . . riper humanity, more compassionate understanding, expressed in a way impossible to achieve except through music."

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